The HEXAGON project aims at creating an effective optimization toolbox for solving one of the hardest decision problems in industry: the planning and management of power grids.
Power transmission and distribution is one of the most complex man-made processes. Power grids are an authentic Engineering marvel that ensures that energy produced in power plants big and small is delivered to household, offices, and industrial centers across the country.
Growing demand for energy, new energy sources, climate change, and the increasing number of electric vehicles: these are the daunting challenges that power grid managers face every day to ensure the delivery of energy to every last user. One of the greatest challenges is a fundamental problem solved by power grid operators, both at the transmission and the distribution level. It is a mathematical optimization problem known as Optimal Power Flow (OPF): across the whole power grid, the current through every line (or branch in Power Engineering parlance) and the voltage of every node (or bus) must satisfy several conservation constraints originating from Physics, and the operating cost of the grid must be kept to a minimum.
This optimization problem is subject of research for scholars from various disciplines. The most natural model for the OPF problem is an optimization model with discrete variables (integer or binary) and nonlinear constraints. As such, the OPF problem is inherently a Mixed Integer Nonlinear Optimization (MINLO) problem. The size of MINLO formulations for the OPF problem is staggering, and even modern software packages for optimization struggle to find good solution to the OPF problem. Often this drives practitioners to choosing sub-optimal solutions, which have massive consequences on cost effectiveness, for lack of scalable, effective solution methods. This is why our team has joined forces to analyze and develop solution tools that are tailor-made for the OPF class of problems. We aim at equip the practitioners in power transmission and distribution with solver components that can be leveraged to finding globally optimal solutions to OPF problems of any sort.
HEXAGON stands for Highly-specialized EXact Algorithms for Grid Operations at the National level. The project is conducted by Optimizers from Università del Sannio, Politecnico di Milano, Università di Bergamo, and Università di Pavia.
This project is supported by the PRIN-PNRR grant P20227CTY3 from the Ministry of University and Research of Italy.