Mississippi State University team wins Department of Energy competition

Mississippi State University group YongOptimization has placed first in the Grid Optimization (GO) Challenge 3 Competition.

Yong Fu, a professor and the Tennessee Valley Authority Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, led the research and development team in the Department of Energy’s Grid Optimization (GO) Competition Challenge III. The competition saw 18 teams battle for the net prize of $3 million. His team ranked first place in six categories of the competition and received a prize award of $645,000. The prize money can be utilized to advance the team’s technologies further to be field-ready for adoption.

“Mississippi State University is well known for its work in supporting the electrical power industry. This latest set of awards to Dr. Yong Fu shows that our impact is being recognized as some of the best in the nation. We are proud of Dr. Fu and his students,” Jason Keith, Dean of the Bagley College of Engineering, said.

The DOE GO Competition is a battleground for power system engineers, operations research engineers and high-performance computing experts. The third of four challenges, Challenge 3, focused on identifying transformational and disruptive software solutions for critical power system operation problems that will accelerate the development and adoption of emerging technologies in power grids.

“Today’s power grid is becoming more diverse and integrated with high-level distributed energy resources and smart control technologies that are creating a new set of grid management challenges in terms of large-scale, nonlinear, and non-convex problem modeling, complex and time-consuming computation, as well as difficult uncertainty handling,” Fu said. “A complex knowledge of the problem field and industry practice is essential to the GO Competition, and our approach was to explore parallel optimization algorithms for complex and realistic power system models and develop fast, efficient, and robust grid optimization solutions on the high-performance computing platform that will enable increased grid economics, flexibility, resilience, as well as energy security in the United States.”

Fu said how proud he was of his team and the hard work they put in to make the competition a success.

“The great work with my Ph.D. students - Yehong Peng,  Fasiha Zainab and Komal Naz made the success of our innovative solution methodology and advanced programming technology in the GO Competition. It will lead us to pursue more industry collaborations and encourages more students to get involved in such great software development for a wide range of real-world power system applications,” Fu said.

Fu’s team was also a top performer in the USA DOE ARPA-E GO Competition Challenge I in 2020 with a prize award of $300,000.

The GO Competition was created by Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to accelerate the development of transformational and disruptive methods for solving the most pressing power system problems. The GO Competition is staged as a series of challenges in power systems to address emerging needs and new technologies on the grid.

With this competition, ARPA-E aims to provide fair and transparent comparisons of industrially relevant algorithm performance on high-fidelity, open-access, large-scale power system models and a platform for identifying transformational and disruptive methods for solving power system optimization problems.

For more information, see the DOE ARPA-E GO Competition website: https://gocompetition.energy.gov/challenges/Challenge-3/Leaderboards

For more information about Yong Fu, please visit his website https://my.ece.msstate.edu/faculty/fu/

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Mississippi State University consists of 27 faculty members (including seven endowed professors), seven professional staff, and over 700 undergraduate and graduate students, with approximately 100 being at the Ph.D. level. With a research expenditure of over $14.24 million, the department houses the largest High Voltage Laboratory among North American universities. More information may be found on ECE’s website.

The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is online at www.ece.msstate.edu and can be found at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin.

The Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube at @msuengineering.

Mississippi State University is taking care of what matters. Learn more at www.msstate.edu.

By Camille Carskadon