Emma Benjaminson

Emma Benjaminson

Electric utilities must make massive capital investments in the coming years to respond to explosive growth in demand, aging assets and rising threats from extreme weather. Utilities today already have rigorous frameworks for capital planning, and there are opportunities to extend this capability to solve multi-objective optimization problems in the face of uncertainty. This work presents a four-part framework that 1) incorporates extreme weather as a source of uncertainty, 2) leverages a digital twin of the grid, 3) uses Monte Carlo simulation to capture variability and 4) applies a multi-objective optimization method for finding the optimal investment portfolio. We use this framework to investigate whether grid-aware optimization methods outperform model-free approaches. We find that, in fact, given the computational complexity of model-based metaheuristic optimization methods, the simpler net present value ranking method was able to find more optimal portfolios with only limited knowledge of the grid.

Emma Benjaminson, Rebecca E. Taylor, Matthew Travers

The field of DNA nanotechnology has made it possible to assemble, with high yields, different structures that have actionable properties. For example, researchers have created components that can be actuated. An exciting next step is to combine these components into multifunctional nanorobots that could, potentially, perform complex tasks like swimming to a target location in the human body, detect an adverse reaction and then release a drug load to stop it. However, as we start to assemble more complex nanorobots, the yield of the desired nanorobot begins to decrease as the number of possible component combinations increases. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this work is to develop a predictive model to maximize yield. However, training predictive models typically requires a large dataset. For the nanorobots we are interested in assembling, this will be difficult to collect. This is because high-fidelity data, which allows us to characterize the shape and size of individual structures, is very time-consuming to collect, whereas low-fidelity data is readily available but only captures bulk statistics for different processes. Therefore, this work combines low- and high-fidelity data to train a generative model using a two-step process. We first use a relatively small, high-fidelity dataset to train a generative model. At run time, the model takes low-fidelity data and uses it to approximate the high-fidelity content. We do this by biasing the model towards samples with specific properties as measured by low-fidelity data. In this work we bias our distribution towards a desired node degree of a graphical model that we take as a surrogate representation of the nanorobots that this work will ultimately focus on. We have not yet accumulated a high-fidelity dataset of nanorobots, so we leverage the MolGAN architecture [1] and the QM9 small molecule dataset [2-3] to demonstrate our approach.