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.

Publications

2022
A massively parallel interior-point solver for LPs with generalized arrowhead structure, and applications to energy system models European Journal of Operational Research, 296(1), pp. 60-71, 2022 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 19-41) Daniel Rehfeldt, Hannes Hobbie, David Schönheit, Thorsten Koch, Dominik Möst, Ambros Gleixner PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
2021
SCIP-Jack: An exact high performance solver for Steiner tree problems in graphs and related problems Modeling, Simulation and Optimization of Complex Processes HPSC 2018, LNCS, 2021 Daniel Rehfeldt, Yuji Shinano, Thorsten Koch BibTeX
DOI
BEAM-ME
2020
BEAM-ME: Accelerating Linear Energy Systems Models by a Massively Parallel Interior Point Method NIC Symposium 2020, pp. 345-352, Vol.50, NIC Series, 2020 Thomas Breuer, Michael Bussieck, Karl-Kien Cao, Fred Fiand, Hans-Christian Gils, Ambros Gleixner, Dmitry Khabi, Nils Kempke, Thorsten Koch, Daniel Rehfeldt, Manuel Wetzel BibTeX
BEAM-ME
Conflict Analysis for MINLP ZIB-Report 20-20 Timo Berthold, Jakob Witzig PDF
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BEAM-ME
Conflict-Free Learning for Mixed Integer Programming Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming. CPAIOR 2020, pp. 521-530, LNCS, 2020 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 19-59) Jakob Witzig, Timo Berthold PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
First Experiments with Structure-Aware Presolving for a Parallel Interior-Point Method Operations Research Proceedings 2019, pp. 105-111, 2020 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 19-39) Ambros Gleixner, Nils-Christian Kempke, Thorsten Koch, Daniel Rehfeldt, Svenja Uslu PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
On the exact solution of prize-collecting Steiner tree problems ZIB-Report 20-11 Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF
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BEAM-ME
2019
An Easy Way to Build Parallel State-of-the-art Combinatorial Optimization Problem Solvers: A Computational Study on Solving Steiner Tree Problems and Mixed Integer Semidefinite Programs by using ug[SCIP-*,*]-libraries Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Workshop Parallel / Distributed Combinatorics and Optimization, pp. 530-541, 2019 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 19-14) Yuji Shinano, Daniel Rehfeldt, Tristan Gally PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
BEAM-ME: Ein interdisziplinärer Beitrag zur Erreichung der Klimaziele OR-News : das Magazin der GOR, pp. 6-8, 2019 Thomas Breuer, Michael Bussieck, Frederik Fiand, Karl-Kiên Cao, Hans Christian Gils, Manuel Wetzel, Ambros Gleixner, Thorsten Koch, Daniel Rehfeldt, Dmitry Khabi BibTeX
BEAM-ME
Building Optimal Steiner Trees on Supercomputers by Using up to 43,000 Cores Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research. CPAIOR 2019, pp. 529-539, Vol.11494, LNCS, 2019 (preprint available as ) Yuji Shinano, Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch BibTeX
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BEAM-ME
Combining NP-Hard Reduction Techniques and Strong Heuristics in an Exact Algorithm for the Maximum-Weight Connected Subgraph Problem SIAM Journal on Optimization, 29(1), pp. 369-398, 2019 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 17-45) Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
Computational Aspects of Infeasibility Analysis in Mixed Integer Programming ZIB-Report 19-54 Jakob Witzig, Timo Berthold, Stefan Heinz PDF
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BEAM-ME
Parallel PIPS-SBB: Multi-Level Parallelism For Stochastic Mixed-Integer Programs Computational Optimization and Applications, 2019 (epub ahead of print, preprint available as ZIB-Report 17-58) Lluis-Miquel Munguia, Geoffrey Oxberry, Deepak Rajan, Yuji Shinano PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
Reduction Techniques for the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problem and the Maximum-Weight Connected Subgraph Problem Networks, Vol.73, pp. 206-233, 2019 (preprint available as ) Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch, Stephen J. Maher BibTeX
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BEAM-ME
2018
Feature-Based Algorithm Selection for Mixed Integer Programming ZIB-Report 18-17 Alexander Georges, Ambros Gleixner, Gorana Gojic, Robert Lion Gottwald, David Haley, Gregor Hendel, Bartlomiej Matejczyk PDF
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BEAM-ME
Optimizing Large-Scale Linear Energy System Problems with Block Diagonal Structure by Using Parallel Interior-Point Methods Operations Research Proceedings 2017, pp. 641-647, 2018 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 17-75) Thomas Breuer, Michael Bussieck, Karl-Kien Cao, Felix Cebulla, Frederik Fiand, Hans Christian Gils, Ambros Gleixner, Dmitry Khabi, Thorsten Koch, Daniel Rehfeldt, Manuel Wetzel PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
Reduction-based exact solution of prize-collecting Steiner tree problems ZIB-Report 18-55 Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF
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BEAM-ME
SCIP-Jack—a solver for STP and variants with parallelization extensions: An update Operations Research Proceedings 2017, pp. 191-196, 2018 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 18-05) Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
Transformations for the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree Problem and the Maximum-Weight Connected Subgraph Problem to SAP Journal of Computational Mathematics, 36(3), pp. 459-468, 2018 (preprint available as ZIB-Report 16-36) Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF (ZIB-Report)
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BEAM-ME
2017
Generalized preprocessing techniques for Steiner tree and maximum-weight connected subgraph problems ZIB-Report 17-57 Daniel Rehfeldt, Thorsten Koch PDF
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BEAM-ME
2016
Methoden zur Reduktion der Rechenzeit linearer Optimierungsmodelle in der Energiewirtschaft - Eine Performance-Analyse EnInnov 2016: 14. Symposium Energieinnovation 2016, 2016 Karl-Kiên Cao, Ambros Gleixner, Matthias Miltenberger PDF
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BEAM-ME