Competition

Scheduling in SmartGrids

Energy demands in a single home or across multiple homes in a neighborhood are often flexible. In this competition, your team will develop a tool to handle the scheduling of appliances in a home (or in a neighborhood) that aims to reduce costs for the consumer while maintaining level loads for the utility company. See the problem description below for more information:

Problem description
Sample data sets

Winners, Finalists, and Honorable Mentions

The winners, finalists, and honorable mentions have been chosen!

Winner

  • Team: Yie Galindo, University at Buffalo, United States of America
  • Members: Gina M. Galindo-Pacheco, Ruben D. Yie-Pinedo
  • Advisor: Rajan Batta

Finalist

  • Team: Smart Power Engineers, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany
  • Members: Soner Emec, Florian W. Huber
  • Advisor: Rüdiger Stephan

Finalist

  • Team: SMART, University of Twente, The Netherlands
  • Members: Dorien M. Cluwen, Irana Denisson
  • Advisor: Bodo Manthey

Honorable Mention

  • Team: Management Science Lab
  • Members: Gigyoung Park, Junsang Yuh, Gilhyun Do
  • Advisor: Youngho Lee

We want to thank all participants this year as it has been a great success. We look forward to the AIMMS-MOPTA Modeling Competition in 2013!

The original announcement for the competition follows below.

Eligibility

Teams of at most three students can participate. The team leader has to be a graduate student, though the other members of the team can be advanced undergraduate students. Each member of the team must be registered as a full-time student at a recognized educational institution during the Spring term of the 2011-2012 academic year. Students with a background in optimization, regardless of their actual field of study, are eligible. Collaboration between students from different departments is strongly encouraged. Each team must declare a team advisor with which the team may consult about the problem and their solution. It is the team advisor’s responsibility to ensure that the students have appropriate knowledge for the competition. The team advisor should not be involved as a participant in the solution process.

As the conference is international, so is the competition. Teams from all over the world can participate, as long as at least one team member can come to the conference, should the team make it to the final round. The official language of the competition is English.

After your team has registered (see below), you will receive license files and download paths for the software. There is no deadline for registration, but there is a deadline for the submission of your solution.

If you have any questions please contact for software and licensing related issues or Frank E. Curtis at for other questions about the competition and the case study.

Competition format

The competition consists of a few stages. In the first stage the teams are asked to model an optimization problem (see the problem description above) using AIMMS. They must submit a complete solution to the problem, including:

  • implementation of models in AIMMS, including a graphical user interface, providing the user with graphical and textual output;
  • solutions of the models for the given data sets, as well as those for other data sets generated;
  • a 10-15 page report that discusses the models developed (along with mathematical background), the solutions obtained, and further recommendations.

A panel of judges, including representatives from both the conference organizing committee and Paragon Decision Technology (the developer of AIMMS) evaluates the submissions, provides feedback to the teams and invites finalists to continue in the second stage of the project and present their work at a dedicated session of the conference. In this second stage, the finalists will receive advice from the panel on ways in which they can improve their model and solution and have time before the conference to continue to improve their solution. After the presentations at the conference, the judges will ask questions. The finalists are ranked based on a combined score for their model, implementation, report, solution, oral presentation, and answers to the judges’ questions. The decision of the judges is final and cannot be appealed.

Prizes

Each finalist team will receive free registration for the conference for up to two team members. In addition, a cash prize of $600 will be awarded to the team that wins the overall competition.

Important dates

Case Study Posted: 17 January 2012
Solutions Due: 31 May 2012
Finalists Chosen: 21 June 2012
Conference Begins: 30 July 2012

Registration

Registration for the competition is closed.

Solution submission

The submission form for the competition is closed.

Copyright

By submitting an entry to the competition you agree that the organizers own the copyright to a copy of your submission. This does not limit your rights to publish your work, give talks, posters, etc., but grants the organizers of the competition the right to use your work.