Internship: Mechanism Design via Flexibilty Disaggregation

_Le descriptif de l’offre ci-dessous est en Anglais_ TYPE DE CONTRAT : Stage NIVEAU DE DIPLÔME EXIGÉ : Bac + 5 ou équivalent FONCTION : Stagiaire de la recherche A PROPOS DU CENTRE OU DE LA DIRECTION FONCTIONNELLE The Inria Lille - Nord Europe research center, created in 2008, employs 360 people including 305 scientists in 15 research teams. Recognized for its strong involvement in the socio-economic development of the Hauts-De-France region, the Inria Lille - Nord Europe research center pursues a close relationship with large companies and SMEs. By promoting synergies between researchers and industrialists, Inria participates in the transfer of skills and expertise in digital technologies and provides access to the best European and international research for the benefit of innovation and companies, particularly in the region. For more than 10 years, the Inria Lille - Nord Europe center has been located at the heart of the university and scientific ecosystem in Lille, as well as at the heart of Frenchtech, with a technology showroom based on avenue de Bretagne in Lille, on the site of economic excellence dedicated to information and communication technologies (ICT) that is EuraTechnologies. CONTEXTE ET ATOUTS DU POSTE The INOCS team aims to develop new models, algorithmic techniques and implementations for problems with complex structure according to three types of optimization paradigms: mathematical optimization, bilevel optimization and robust/stochastic optimization. The intern will be hosted at Inria Lille-Nord Europe. Some collaborations are possible with EDF R& D lab at Paris Saclay and with the LIA, at the University of Avignon. MISSION CONFIÉE Recently, [1] proposed a method to disaggregate an aggregate consumption profile over a set of flexibilities. The key point of this method is that it is privacy-preserving, meaning that individual consumers keep private the set of constraints characterizing their individual electricity usage. An iterative procedure is used between a utility company and the consumers, and the latter only provide binary information which allows the utility company progressing in the disaggregation task. The system operator controls the flexibilities to activate on the distribution grid, in order to minimize its activation cost while taking into account a number of network constraints capturing operational aspects as well as power-flows equations modeling the laws of physics of the power flows. In this framework, the flexibilities can come from individual consumers or from groups of consumers whose flexibilities are aggregated by a utility company (for example, flexibilities from electric vehicles can be reported by fleet/charging stations operator, flexibilities from water heaters by an aggregator, etc.). Utility companies may have a detailed access to the constraints of their consumers, but it is not necessarily possible nor adequate to take this level of detail in the system operator’s flexibility activation problem, as the dimension of the resulting problem would be prohibitive, and for privacy reasons. References [1] P. Jacquot, O. Beaude, P. Benchimol, S. Gaubert, and N. Oudjane, A privacy-preserving method to optimize distributed resource allocation, SIAM Journal on Optimization, vol. 30, pp. 2303-–2336, 2020. [2] H. Le Cadre, Y. Mou, H. HÅNoschle, Parametrized Inexact-ADMM Based Coordination Games: a Normalized Nash Equilibrium Approach, European Journal of Operation Research, vol. 296, no. 2, pp. 696–716, 2022. PRINCIPALES ACTIVITÉS The problem is that consumers can often receive monetary gains by strategically misrepresenting their usage patterns (e.g., baseline inflation) and preferences to the utility company, and many of the incentive programs in deployment today are not robust to strategic data manipulation. The goal of this internship is i) to model the interactions between the consumers– utility company as a principal–agent problem, ii) to develop a mechanism that the utility company can employ to design incentives while estimating the consumers’ utility functions/preferences, using the aggregated as well as the disaggregated flexibility data, iii) to quantify the impact of the sharing of information from the distribution system operator through the design of a network tariff reflecting the individual contribution of consumers on the congestion state of the network. COMPÉTENCES We are looking for a highly motivated second year Master student, who would like to be involved in a 5 to 6 months internship. The candidate should have a very good background in mathematical optimization/game theory/operations research, interests for economics, and basic programming skills in python. AVANTAGES * Subsidized meals * Partial reimbursement of public transport costs * Professional equipment available (videoconferencing, loan of computer equipment, etc.) * Social, cultural and sports events and activities RÉMUNÉRATION Internship