Operations research | EPFL Graph Search

Operations research (operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decision-making. The term management science is occasionally used as a synonym. Employing techniques from other mathematical sciences, such as modeling, statistics, and optimization, operations research arrives at optimal or near-optimal solutions to decision-making problems. Because of its emphasis on practical applications, operations research has overlapped with many other disciplines, notably industrial engineering. Operations research is often concerned with determining the extreme values of some real-world objective: the maximum (of profit, performance, or yield) or minimum (of loss, risk, or cost). Originating in military efforts before World War II, its techniques have grown to concern problems in a variety of industries. Overview Operati

Object-oriented approach for dynamic system modelling and simulation

Adel Besrour

Software engineering always cares to provide solutions for building applications as close as possible to what they should be, according to the requirements and the final users needs. Systems behavior simulation is a very common application to virtually reproduce and often predict the real-world behavior. Simulation is one of the most operational research tool in a large variety of engineering and scientific domains: Transport, telecommunication, medicine, chemical processes, physics, etc. The complexity of such application is relative to the increasing complexity of the systems. In this context, it is relevant to bring together different tools and formalisms such as markovian chain, Petri nets, etc., to improve the existent approaches and so to answer the simulations performances needs. The principle objective of this thesis is to bring together techniques from software engineering and safety engineering in order to improve the state of the art of modeling and simulation of dynamic systems in the industrial context. In addressing this objective, this work initially involves defining the essential limitations of the used formalisms, methods and tools regarding from one hand the software engineering modeling and simulation techniques and from the other hand the existent risk analysis methodologies. This work is conducted with respect to the problem of danger identification, considering the context of the complex systems behavior and their interaction with the human operator. In software engineering, it is well known that Petri/high-level nets have attractive characteristics to be used in systems simulation and behavior prediction such as the natural graphical representation, and their well-defined semantic. They are well-suited for the description of complex situations with concurrency (interleaving and true concurrency depending on the underlying semantics), conflict and confusion. However, the absence of structuring capabilities has been one of the main criticisms raised against Petri nets/high-level nets. Thus, there have been many attempts to introduce structuring principles in nets of this kind [BCM88] [Kie89] [JR91]. The attractive characteristics of Petri/high-level nets have prompted researchers to enrich these formalisms with object-oriented features. CO-OPN (Concurrent Object-Oriented Petri Net) approach, brings together the power of both Petri/high-level nets and object-orientation techniques, it has been devised so as to offer an adequate framework for the specification and design of large scale concurrent system [BG91]. CO-OPN, as a powerful modeling tool, has been used in a limited way to simulate systems. This work aims to provide a CO-OPN extension to allow a more realistic systems' simulation. Actually, its simulator semantic uses to be a suitable approach for modeling near closed systems and software components, because they need to loose coupling with external world. But, when we model more realistic problems like industrial processes, where human interaction is a relevant event, this approach is not sufficient to catch all system activity attributes. Moreover, the CO-OPN interpretation process does not allow interaction with the object internal states. This work provides a new solution to overcome CO-OPN simulation limitations and a set of prototypes to assist dynamic systems simulations. Furthermore, this work has been conducted in a Risk Analysis (RA) context, a domain where computer-based simulations research are of utmost interest. Actually, classical approaches used to address complex workplace hazard in a limited way, using checklists or sequence models. Moreover, the use of single oriented methods, such as AEA (man-oriented), FMEA (machine oriented) or HAZOP (process oriented), is not satisfactory to overcome the increasing sophistication of industrial processes. The automation of a part of the analysis process as well as the multiple-oriented approach allowed by dynamic modeling may indeed enhance significantly the analysis completeness and reduce the time analyzing time. This work, based on Object Oriented Petri net formalism (CO-OPN), propose an alternative multi-oriented approach where existent methods limitations have been criticized to develop a dynamic model, MORM (Man-machine Occupational Risk Modeling). A real industrial system (metal wire making process) has been specified to implement the different approach steps (system identification, model application, system simulation, system analysis).

EPFL2005

Iterative simulation and optimization approach for energy performance evaluation of ground source heat pump systems

Sarah Bourgarel

The energy transition in Switzerland specifies reduction of the country’s primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. In the building sector, one way to achieve this is through adoption of efficient and sustainable technologies. With this aim, the building energy systems are gaining complexity. Modelling tools are becoming increasingly important in the design and evaluation of such systems. Two modelling methods are commonly used, simulation and optimization, which substantially differ in their approach and purpose. Simulation is a descriptive tool used to virtually represent systems’ behaviour under given conditions and operation strategies. Optimization approaches explore the possible scenarios under given system limits; they determine the best solution by optimizing an objective function described in mathematical form. In this project, the interactions and complementary use of these methods are investigated through evaluation of the newly installed energy systems of multi-familiy houses built in Zurich. The systems include renewable sources from solar and geothermal energy. The main components are a heat pump coupled with a borehole heat exchanger (BHE) and solar photovoltaic panels (PV) or hybrid photovoltaic panels (PV/T) for electricity production. Two system variants including different rates of borehole regeneration resulting from free cooling of the houses or injection of heat produced by PV/T are evaluated. The systems are divided into interlinked blocks representing the main components of the system: the borehole heat exchanger and surrounding ground, the heat pump, the storage tanks, the piping systems and the photovoltaic installations. The blocks are simulated with an hourly time scale. Energy consumption, self-consumption of on site produced electricity as well as performance degradation due to the long term operation are some of the results obtained from simulation. Monitoring data are used for calibration and validation of the simulation model. Separate optimization models of the evaluated energy systems are then developed. They are improved based on system characteristics obtained from the simulation model. In this way, optimal operation strategies which take into account specific operational limits are identified. Different levels of precision of parameters integration from the simulation results (constant over the year and hourly defined) are implemented and the influences on the optimization results are investigated. The results of the optimization are subsequently implemented in the simulation model. The results of the simulation found that the boreholes are sustainably exploited due the conservative design of the system according the simulated operation conditions. The influence of the regeneration is noticeable, however the simulation of the long term operation of a hypothetical variant without regeneration induces only a limited efficiency decrease and can also be considered as sustainable. The optimization results showed that the self consumption of electricity produced on site can be significantly improved by adapting the heat pump production profile with the electricity production; this was achieved through judicious management of the storage tanks. The analysis of the different level of parameter integration in the optimization model revealed that the optimization results are sensitive to the level of precision of the parameters. The iterative process allowed to combine the strengths of both modelling methods: the simulation was used to precisely describe the systems behaviour. Operational profiles from optimization were subsequently used in the simulation. The outcome of this process helped to better understand the system, identify optimal operating strategies while considering system limitations, as well as presenting

2017

Tessellation and lmprovement of Simplicial Meshes using Neural Networks

Alexis Papagiannopoulos

Modern mesh generation addresses the development of robust algorithms that construct a discrete representation of the geometry into polytopal elements conforming to divergent properties: (i) fidelity to complex geometrical features, (ii) support for high spatial resolution in areas of interest and sparsity elsewhere, and (iii) preservation of optimal element geometry (quality). The automation of the meshing process with respect to these properties is still considered a critical bottleneck as it is often tied to the development of complex algorithms. Although such algorithms produce meshes that satisfy desirable properties, they may entail a significant computational cost. To tackle the automation hurdles of current algorithms, this research work studies the adaption of Neural Networks (NNs) that have been proven efficient in automating complex problems, for the development of meshing algorithms. A machine learning meshing scheme for the generation of simplicial meshes is proposed based on the predictions of NNs. The scheme is applied to small contours with up to 16 edges. The data extracted from the meshed contours are utilized to train NNs that approximate the number of vertices to be inserted inside a contour cavity, their location, and the connectivity. Based on an element quality metric, the results show a maximum deviation of 27.3% on the minimum quality between the elements of the meshes generated by the scheme and the ones generated from a reference mesher. This level of deviation corresponds to produced meshes with element angles that lie between 28Â°

EPFL2021