Clearing and pricing in markets with complex bids

Presented by Gavin Bell (CEO at Optimeering AS)

Markets are increasingly being used in industry and organizations to procure goods and services that are provided or consumed in defined time intervals or specific volumes.

An important example of this are products and services in electricity markets, such as power reserve capacity and energy. Markets for so-called primary, secondary and tertiary capacity reserve are currently being developed in the Nordic power markets and are proposed or under development for a number of other European power markets. Such markets are often characterized by multiple, complex products. Bids may be linked over time and across products. Procurement can be driven by multiple objectives such as price and security of supply, that may be difficult to define quantitatively and difficult to compare.

There are often multiple stakeholders involved with differing backgrounds, assumptions, agendas and goals. Existing legal frameworks and rules may also constrain the market and its clearing and pricing processes. Mathematically, the markets are often mixed-integer non-convex, which poses significant challenges in designing and implementing market clearing algorithms in practice.

In this presentation, I talk about our experience in developing and implementing clearing algorithms for these types of markets and for calculating clearing prices, with a focus on market clearing for power reserve services.

2 October 2020 WEBINAR RECORDING

London Cycle Hire Scheme – Rethinking distribution for one of the largest bike sharing programs in Europe

Presented by Filippo Focacci (CO-founder and CEO, DecisionBrain),

Desiree Rigonat (OR consultant and Data Analyst, DecisionBrain)

Based on machine learning and mathematical optimization, DecisionBrain’s applications are used every day to optimize the workforce of market leaders in the Services industry such as ISS, JLL and Serco. This presentation shows how we optimize operations for the London Cycle Hire, one of the largest bikes sharing systems in the world.

DPO (Distribution Planning Optimization) is a Smart Planning System designed for Serco’s Control Room. Its goal is to help planners drive the scheme with the right inventory of bikes in the right place at the right time at the lowest cost. DPO forecasts, in real time, the number of bicycle pickups and returns at each station. It computes target inventory levels at each hour of the day and determines the most efficient routes for the vans to redistribute bicycles from stations in excess to stations in shortage.

The insights and alerts provided via a very intuitive user interface enable planners to focus on analysis and exception management rather than repetitive tasks.

The benefits of the system include:

– Increase of ridership and customer satisfaction

– Reduction of operation costs

– Reduction of penalty costs due to full and empty stations

4 September 2020 WEBINAR RECORDING

Mathematical Optimization

Presented by Martina Fischetti (Lead Engineer at Vattenfall)

Moments of crisis are also opportunities to look at the world with new eyes. This is how we discovered an analogy between the optimization challenge of locating turbines offshore (main expertise of the speaker) and the one of locating facilities to ensure social distancing and safety during COVID-pandemic. This allows us to use our expertise to help businesses and customers during this challenging period. In particular, we show that using mathematical optimization one can increase profit for businesses (fitting more tables in a restaurant or umbrellas on a beach) while also increasing safety for customers.

3 July 2020 WEBINAR RECORDING