Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2406. Enhancing Energy Planning with Gurobi: Bridging Historical Challenges and Modern Optimization Tools

Invited abstract in session TA-9: OR Software in Practice, stream Software for Operations Research.

Thursday, 8:45-10:15
Room: H15

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Christine Tawfik
Experts team, Gurobi Optimization

Abstract

Mathematical optimization has played a crucial role in the energy sector since its introduction in the mid-20th century. Production and plant operations have always required complex planning optimization to account for all the involved and highly intertwined decision factors. Over the past decades, energy modeling has significantly evolved, yet practitioners continue to face persistent challenges in accurately capturing system complexities and solving large-scale optimization problems. More recently, against the backdrop of energy transition and the incorporation of renewable resources, new challenges have emerged to accurately capture the fluctuating market supply and demand, as well as to evaluate decisions by weighing both economic and environmental considerations.

This talk begins with a brief historical overview of energy modeling, highlighting recurring pain points such as scenario management, model scalability, and solution interpretability. We will touch upon relevant aspects related to unit commitment problems, investment planning and integration of distributed energy resources.

We then explore how Gurobi’s advanced features — such as multi-scenario modeling and multiple objectives — can directly address these issues, offering energy modelers intuitive and adaptable mechanisms to precisely represent their problems. Additionally, we dive into some of Gurobi's diagnostics tools to examine their benefit in analyzing and interpreting solutions. By aligning the sector needs with modern solver capabilities, this session aims to equip attendees with practical strategies to enhance energy modeling accuracy and performance.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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