Nowadays, power systems are dealing with some new challenges raisedby the major changes that have been taken place since 80’s, e.g., deregu-lation in electricity markets, significant increase of electricity demands andmore recently large-scale integration of renewable energy resources such aswind power. Therefore, system operators must make some adjustments toaccommodate these changes into the future of power systems.One of the main challenges is maintaining the system stability since theextra stress caused by the above changes reduces the stability margin, andmay lead to rise of many undesirable phenomena. The other important chal-lenge is to cope with uncertainty and variability of renewable energy sourceswhich make power systems to become more stochastic in nature, and lesscontrollable.Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) have emerged as a solutionto help power systems with these new challenges. This thesis aims to ap-propriately utilize such devices in order to increase the transmission capacityand flexibility, improve the dynamic behavior of power systems and integratemore renewable energy into the system. To this end, the most appropriatelocations and settings of these controllable devices need to be determined.This thesis mainly looks at (i) rotor angle stability, i.e., small signal andtransient stability (ii) system operation under wind uncertainty. In the firstpart of this thesis, trajectory sensitivity analysis is used to determine themost suitable placement of FACTS devices for improving rotor angle sta-bility, while in the second part, optimal settings of such devices are foundto maximize the level of wind power integration. As a general conclusion,it was demonstrated that FACTS devices, installed in proper locations andtuned appropriately, are effective means to enhance the system stability andto handle wind uncertainty.The last objective of this thesis work is to propose an efficient solutionapproach based on Benders’ decomposition to solve a network-constrained acunit commitment problem in a wind-integrated power system. The numericalresults show validity, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach. / <p>The Doctoral Degrees issued upon completion of the programme are issued by Comillas Pontifical University, Delft University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The invested degrees are official in Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden, respectively.QC 20141028</p>

The air transportation market has been growing steadily for the past three decades since the airline deregulation in 1978. With competition also becoming more intense, airline companies have been trying to enhance their market shares and profit margins by composing favorable flight schedules and by efficiently allocating their resources of aircraft and crews so as to reduce operational costs. In practice, this is achieved based on demand forecasts and resource availabilities through a structured airline scheduling process that is comprised of four decision stages: schedule planning, fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew scheduling. The outputs of this process are flight schedules along with associated assignments of aircraft and crews that maximize the total expected profit. Traditionally, airlines deal with these four operational scheduling stages in a sequential manner. However, there exist obvious interdependencies among these stages so that restrictive solutions from preceding stages are likely to limit the scope of decisions for succeeding stages, thus leading to suboptimal results and even infeasibilities. To overcome this drawback, we first study the aircraft routing problem, and develop some novel modeling foundations based on which we construct and analyze an integrated model that incorporates fleet assignment, aircraft routing, and crew pairing within a single framework. Given a set of flights to be covered by a specific fleet type, the aircraft routing problem (ARP) determines a flight sequence for each individual aircraft in this fleet, while incorporating specific considerations of minimum turn-time and maintenance checks, as well as restrictions on the total accumulated flying time, the total number of takeoffs, and the total number of days between two consecutive maintenance operations. This stage is significant to airline companies as it directly assigns routes and maintenance breaks for each aircraft in service. Most approaches for solving this problem adopt set partitioning formulations that include exponentially many variables, thus requiring the design of specialized column generation or branch-and-price algorithms. In this dissertation, however, we present a novel compact polynomially sized representation for the ARP, which is then linearized and lifted using the Reformulation-Linearization Technique (RLT). The resulting formulation remains polynomial in size, and we show that it can be solved very efficiently by commercial software without complicated algorithmic implementations. Our numerical experiments using real data obtained from United Airlines demonstrate significant savings in computational effort; for example, for a daily network involving 344 flights, our approach required only about 10 CPU seconds for deriving an optimal solution. We next extend Model ARP to incorporate its preceding and succeeding decision stages, i.e., fleet assignment and crew pairing, within an integrated framework. We formulate a suitable representation for the integrated fleeting, routing, and crew pairing problem (FRC), which accommodates a set of fleet types in a compact manner similar to that used for constructing the aforementioned aircraft routing model, and we generate eligible crew pairings on-the-fly within a set partitioning framework. Furthermore, to better represent industrial practice, we incorporate itinerary-based passenger demands for different fare-classes. The large size of the resulting model obviates a direct solution using off-the-shelf software; hence, we design a solution approach based on Benders decomposition and column generation using several acceleration techniques along with a branch-and-price heuristic for effectively deriving a solution to this model. In order to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model and solution approach and to provide insights for the airline industry, we generated several test instances using historical data obtained from United Airlines. Computational results reveal that the massively-sized integrated model can be effectively solved in reasonable times ranging from several minutes to about ten hours, depending on the size and structure of the instance. Moreover, our benchmark results demonstrate an average of 2.73% improvement in total profit (which translates to about 43 million dollars per year) over a partially integrated approach that combines the fleeting and routing decisions, but solves the crew pairing problem sequentially. This improvement is observed to accrue due to the fact that the fully integrated model effectively explores alternative fleet assignment decisions that better utilize available resources and yield significantly lower crew costs. / Ph. D.

Le problème d’ordre linéaire (LOP) a reçu beaucoup d’attention dans différents domaines d’application, allant de l’archéologie à l’ordonnancement en passant par l’économie et même de la psychologie mathématique. Ce problème est aussi connu pour être parmi les problèmes NP-difficiles. Nous considérons dans cette thèse une variante de (LOP) sous contrainte de cardinalité. Nous cherchons donc un ordre linéaire d’un sous-ensemble de sommets du graphe de préférences de cardinalité fixée et de poids maximum. Ce problème, appelé (FCLOP) pour ’fixed-cardinality linear ordering problem’, n’a pas été étudié en tant que tel dans la littérature scientifique même si plusieurs applications dans les domaines de macro-économie, de classification dominante ou de transport maritime existent concrètement. On retrouve en fait ses caractéristiques dans les modèles étendus de sous-graphes acycliques. Le problème d’ordre linéaire est déjà connu comme un problème NP-difficile et il a donné lieu à de nombreuses études, tant théoriques sur la structure polyédrale de l’ensemble des solutions réalisables en variables 0-1 que numériques grâce à des techniques de relaxation et de séparation progressive. Cependant on voit qu’il existe de nombreux cas dans la littérature, dans lesquelles des solveurs de Programmation Linéaire en nombres entiers comme CPLEX peuvent en résoudre certaines instances en moins de 10 secondes, mais une fois que la cardinalité est limitée, ces mêmes instances deviennent très difficiles à résoudre. Sur les aspects polyédraux, nous avons étudié le polytope de FCLOP, défini plusieurs classes d’inégalités valides et identifié la dimension ainsi que certaines inégalités qui définissent des facettes pour le polytope de FCLOP. Nous avons introduit un algorithme Relax-and-Cut basé sur ces résultats pour résoudre les instances du problème. Dans cette étude, nous nous sommes également concentrés sur la relaxation Lagrangienne pour résoudre ces cas difficiles. Nous avons étudié différentes stratégies de relaxation et nous avons comparé les bornes duales par rapport à la consolidation obtenue à partir de chaque stratégie de relâcher les contraintes afin de détecter le sous-ensemble des contraintes le plus approprié. Les résultats numériques montrent que nous pouvons trouver des bornes duales de très haute qualité. Nous avons également mis en place une méthode de décomposition Lagrangienne. Dans ce but, nous avons décomposé le modèle de FCLOP en trois sous-problèmes (au lieu de seulement deux) associés aux contraintes de ’tournoi’, de ’graphes sans circuits’ et de ’cardinalité’. Les résultats numériques montrent une amélioration significative de la qualité des bornes duales pour plusieurs cas. Nous avons aussi mis en oeuvre une méthode de plans sécants (cutting plane algorithm) basée sur la relaxation pure des contraintes de circuits. Dans cette méthode, on a relâché une partie des contraintes et on les a ajoutées au modèle au cas où il y a des de/des violations. Les résultats numériques montrent des performances prometteuses quant à la réduction du temps de calcul et à la résolution d’instances difficiles hors d’atteinte des solveurs classiques en PLNE. / Linear Ordering Problem (LOP) has receive significant attention in different areas of application, ranging from transportation and scheduling to economics and even archeology and mathematical psychology. It is classified as a NP-hard problem. Assume a complete weighted directed graph on V n , |V n |= n. A permutation of the elements of this finite set of vertices is a linear order. Now let p be a given fixed integer number, 0 ≤ p ≤ n. The p-Fixed Cardinality Linear Ordering Problem (FCLOP) is looking for a subset of vertices containing p nodes and a linear order on the nodes in S. Graphically, there exists exactly one directed arc between every pair of vertices in an LOP feasible solution, which is also a complete cycle-free digraph and the objective is to maximize the sum of the weights of all the arcs in a feasible solution. In the FCLOP, we are looking for a subset S ⊆ V n such that |S|= p and an LOP on these S nodes. Hence the objective is to find the best subset of the nodes and an LOP over these p nodes that maximize the sum of the weights of all the arcs in the solution. Graphically, a feasible solution of the FCLOP is a complete cycle-free digraph on S plus a set of n − p vertices that are not connected to any of the other vertices. There are several studies available in the literature focused on polyhedral aspects of the linear ordering problem as well as various exact and heuristic solution methods. The fixed cardinality linear ordering problem is presented for the first time in this PhD study, so as far as we know, there is no other study in the literature that has studied this problem. The linear ordering problem is already known as a NP-hard problem. However one sees that there exist many instances in the literature that can be solved by CPLEX in less than 10 seconds (when p = n), but once the cardinality number is limited to p (p < n), the instance is not anymore solvable due to the memory issue. We have studied the polytope corresponding to the FCLOP for different cardinality values. We have identified dimension of the polytope, proposed several classes of valid inequalities and showed that among these sets of valid inequalities, some of them are defining facets for the FCLOP polytope for different cardinality values. We have then introduced a Relax-and-Cut algorithm based on these results to solve instances of the FCLOP. To solve the instances of the problem, in the beginning, we have applied the Lagrangian relaxation algorithm. We have studied different relaxation strategies and compared the dual bound obtained from each case to detect the most suitable subproblem. Numerical results show that some of the relaxation strategies result better dual bound and some other contribute more in reducing the computational time and provide a relatively good dual bound in a shorter time. We have also implemented a Lagrangian decomposition algorithm, decom-6 posing the FCLOP model to three subproblems (instead of only two subproblems). The interest of decomposing the FCLOP model to three subproblems comes mostly from the nature of the three subproblems, which are relatively quite easier to solve compared to the initial FCLOP model. Numerical results show a significant improvement in the quality of dual bounds for several instances. We could also obtain relatively quite better dual bounds in a shorter time comparing to the other relaxation strategies. We have proposed a cutting plane algorithm based on the pure relaxation strategy. In this algorithm, we firstly relax a subset of constraints that due to the problem structure, a very few number of them are active. Then in the course of the branch-and-bound tree we verify if there exist any violated constraint among the relaxed constraints or. Then the characterized violated constraints will be globally added to the model. (...)

In today's competitive environment, the importance of continuous production, quality improvement, and fast delivery has forced production and delivery processes to become highly reliable. Keeping equipment in good condition through maintenance activities can ensure a more reliable system. However, maintenance leads to temporary reduction in capacity that could otherwise be utilized for production. Therefore, the coordination of maintenance and production is important to guarantee good system performance. The central thesis of this dissertation is that integrating maintenance and production decisions increases efficiency by ensuring high quality production, effective resource utilization, and on-time deliveries. Firstly, we study the problem of integrated maintenance and production planning where machines are preventively maintained in the context of a periodic review production system with uncertain yield. Our goal is to provide insight into the optimal maintenance policy, increasing the number of finished products. Specifically, we prove the conditions that guarantee the optimal maintenance policy has a threshold type. Secondly, we address the problem of integrated maintenance planning and production scheduling where machines are correctively maintained in the context of a dynamic aircraft repair shop. To solve the problem, we view the dynamic repair shop as successive static repair scheduling sub-problems over shorter periods. Our results show that the approach that uses logic-based Benders decomposition to solve the static sub-problems, schedules over longer horizon, and quickly adjusts the schedule increases the utilization of aircraft in the long term. Finally, we tackle the problem of integrated maintenance planning and production scheduling where machines are preventively maintained in the context of a multi-machine production system. Depending on the deterioration process of machines, we design decomposed techniques that deal with the stochastic and combinatorial challenges in different, coupled stages. Our results demonstrate that the integrated approaches decrease the total maintenance and lost production cost, maximizing the on-time deliveries. We also prove sufficient conditions that guarantee the monotonicity of the optimal maintenance policy in both machine state and the number of customer orders. Within these three contexts, this dissertation demonstrates that the integrated maintenance and production decision-making increases the process efficiency to produce high quality products in a timely manner.