BEAM-ME

The project "Realisierung von Beschleunigungsstrategien der anwendungsorientierten Mathematik und Informatik für optimierende Energiesystemmodelle" ("BEAM-ME"), which is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, is set against the backdrop of the German "Energiewende" (energy transition), a policy initiated to shift energy systems towards sustainable, renewable technologies. Naturally, this transition comes with a massive decentralization, which brings forth immense challenges in terms of optimizing realistic energy models. In this way, the major aim of the BEAM-ME project is to develop and implement new methods for optimizing energy models of vast size. Mathematically, these problems can be modeled as linear programs (LPs) and mixed-integer programs (MIPs). A distinctive characteristic of the LPs and MIPs arising from the BEAM-ME energy models is their block-diagonal structure with both linking variables and linking constraints. Due to the structure and the size of the problems, a further objective of BEAM-ME is to parallelize the solving procedure and implement it on supercomputers of both the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The main objective of ZIB within the project is to develop and implement methods to solve the LPs (and to a lesser degree also the MIPs) corresponding to the energy problems of BEAM-ME by exploiting their idiosyncratic structure, in particular by the use of parallelization techniques. Concomitantly, ZIB aims at obtaining a concise mathematical description of the highly complex underlying models.