Royal Academy of Engineering Video

The Royal Academy of Engineering recently released a short video showing how the RAEng supports engineering research in the UK:

This video features our work in the Computational Optimisation Group and includes shots of group members Georgia Kouyialis, Dr Dimitris Letsios, Simon Olofsson, and Dr Ruth Misener. We are delighted to have our research featured by the RAEng!

New PhD student

A new PhD student has joined the Computational Optimisation Group. We are happy to welcome Johannes Wiebe as our newest member. He previously obtained an M.Sc. degree in Chemical Engineering from RWTH Aachen, Germany. He is part of the EPSRC HiPEDS Center for Doctoral Training, and under the supervision of Dr Ruth Misener.

Dr Vahan

We want to congratulate Vahan Hovhannisyan for passing his viva today!

Dr Juan

We want to congratulate Juan Campos Salazar for passing his viva today!

Seminar with Prof Miguel Anjos

Professor Miguel Anjos from the University of Edinburgh is giving a seminar on: Tight-and-Cheap Conic Relaxations for AC Optimal Power Flow and Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch

Abstract: The classical alternating current optimal power flow problem is nonconvex and generally hard to solve. We propose a new conic relaxation obtained by combining semidefinite optimization with RLT. The proposed relaxation is stronger than the second-order cone relaxation, competitive with the recently proposed QC relaxation, and up to one order of magnitude faster than for the semidefinite chordal approach on benchmarks with up to 6515 nodes, with comparable global bounds. We extend the approach to optimal reactive power dispatch, which requires the introduction of binary and integer variables, and obtain with similar results and performance.

 

 

 

Seminar with Dr Bissan Ghadder

Dr Bissan Ghadder from University of Waterloo will give is givine a seminar on Optimizing Energy and Water Networks via Sparse Semidefinite Relaxations.

Abstract: Several challenging optimization problems in energy and water networks involve both operational decisions and non-linear constraints of the underlying physics described by the network. However, these networks exhibit a nice sparse structure. This talk provides an overview of approaches that combine recent advances in conic relaxations of polynomial optimization problems along with exploiting structure of the underlying problem. These approaches are demonstrated on applications arising in power and water networks.

Speaker: Dr. Bissan Ghaddar (https://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~bghaddar/) is Assistant Professor in Data Analytics and Operations Research at University of Waterloo. She works on problems at the intersection of smart cities, IoT, data analytics, and mathematical modeling and optimization for large-scale problems.

Time: 11am, 7 July 2025, Huxley 315