Bissan Ghaddar is an Associate Professor of Management Science at the Ivey Business School working on problems at the intersection of smart cities and optimization models. Her research mainly focuses on non-convex optimization problems with application to energy, transportation, and telecommunication networks. Prior to joining Ivey Business School, she was as an Assistant Professor in Data Analytics at the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. She has also worked on energy, water, and transportation network optimization at IBM Research and on inventory management problems at the Centre for Operational Research and Analysis, Department of National Defence Canada. She was invited for extended research visits at the ESSEC Business School, Universität zu Köln in Germany and the University of Avignon in France. Dr. Ghaddar received a Ph.D. degree in operations research from the University of Waterloo, Canada. Her work has been published in prestigious journals such as Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Transportation Research, among others. Her research has been supported by national and international scholarships including OCE, NSERC, Cisco, H2020, and FP7 IIF European Union Grant.
Polynomial Optimization in Power and Water Network Operations
Several challenging optimization problems in power and water networks involve both operational decisions and non-linear models of the underlying physics described by the network. However, these networks exhibit a nice sparse structure. This talk provides an overview of approaches that combine recent advances in conic relaxations of polynomial optimization problems along with exploiting structure of the underlying problem. These approaches are demonstrated on applications arising in power and water networks.