Mehdi Maasoumy

Vasumathi Raman, Alexandre Donzé, Mehdi Maasoumy et al.

We present a mathematical programming-based method for model predictive control of cyber-physical systems subject to signal temporal logic (STL) specifications. We describe the use of STL to specify a wide range of properties of these systems, including safety, response and bounded liveness. For synthesis, we encode STL specifications as mixed integer-linear constraints on the system variables in the optimization problem at each step of a receding horizon control framework. We prove correctness of our algorithms, and present experimental results for controller synthesis for building energy and climate control.

Sarmad Hanif, D. F. R. Melo, Mehdi Maasoumy et al.

This paper proposes a robust demand-side control algorithm in a smart grid environment for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. A robust model predictive control (RMPC) scheme in a receding horizon fashion is deployed, which optimizes electricity cost and capacity market participation of the HVAC system, while satisfying comfort and operational constraints of the building and utility, respectively. Thermal load uncertainties experienced by the HVAC system are included to perform a realistic assessment of the developed controller. The National Electricity Market of Singapore (NEMS) is used as a case study and the developed RMPC scheme is tested for various price signals and scenarios. Numerical simulation results show the effectiveness of the developed framework to be readily adopted by utilities -- interested in realizing a grid-friendly and economicaly eficient demand response (DR) strategy.

Zhaoyang Larry Jin, Mehdi Maasoumy, Yimin Liu et al.

Today's global supply chains face growing challenges due to rapidly changing market conditions, increased network complexity and inter-dependency, and dynamic uncertainties in supply, demand, and other factors. To combat these challenges, organizations employ Material Requirements Planning (MRP) software solutions to set inventory stock buffers - for raw materials, work-in-process goods, and finished products - to help them meet customer service levels. However, holding excess inventory further complicates operations and can lock up millions of dollars of capital that could be otherwise deployed. Furthermore, most commercially available MRP solutions fall short in considering uncertainties and do not result in optimal solutions for modern enterprises. At C3 AI, we fundamentally reformulate the inventory management problem as a constrained stochastic optimization. We then propose a simulation-optimization framework that minimizes inventory and related costs while maintaining desired service levels. The framework's goal is to find the optimal reorder parameters that minimize costs subject to a pre-defined service-level constraint and all other real-world operational constraints. These optimal reorder parameters can be fed back into an MRP system to drive optimal order placement, or used to place optimal orders directly. This approach has proven successful in reducing inventory levels by 10-35 percent, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars of economic benefit for major enterprises at a global scale.

Shouvik Mani, Mehdi Maasoumy, Sina Pakazad et al.

High-dimensional prediction is a challenging problem setting for traditional statistical models. Although regularization improves model performance in high dimensions, it does not sufficiently leverage knowledge on feature importances held by domain experts. As an alternative to standard regularization techniques, we propose Distance Metric Learning Regularization (DMLreg), an approach for eliciting prior knowledge from domain experts and integrating that knowledge into a regularized linear model. First, we learn a Mahalanobis distance metric between observations from pairwise similarity comparisons provided by an expert. Then, we use the learned distance metric to place prior distributions on coefficients in a linear model. Through experimental results on a simulated high-dimensional prediction problem, we show that DMLreg leads to improvements in model performance when the domain expert is knowledgeable.