InfrastructureModels: Composable Multi-infrastructure Optimization in Julia

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing need to understand the complex interdependencies between critical infrastructure systems, for example, electric power, natural gas, and potable water. Whereas open-source and commercial tools for the independent simulation of these systems are well established, frameworks for cosimulation with other systems are nascent and tools for co-optimization are scarce—the major challenge being the hidden combinatorics that arise when connecting multiple-infrastructure system models. Building toward a comprehensive solution for modeling interdependent infrastructure systems, this work presents InfrastructureModels, an extensible, open-source mathematical programming framework for co-optimizing multiple interdependent infrastructures. This work provides new insights into methods and programming abstractions that make state-of-the-art independent infrastructure models composable with minimal additional effort. To that end, this paper presents the design of the InfrastructureModels framework, documents key components of the software’s implementation, and demonstrates its effectiveness with three case studies on canonical co-optimization tasks arising in interdependent infrastructure systems. History: Accepted by Ted Ralphs, Area Editor for Software Tools. Funding: The work was funded by Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Directed Research and Development project “The Optimization of Machine Learning: Imposing Requirements on Artificial Intelligence” and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Advanced Grid Modeling projects “Joint Power System and Natural Gas Pipeline Optimal Expansion Planning” and “Coordinated Planning and Operation of Water and Power Infrastructures for Increased Resilience and Reliability.” This work was carried out under the U.S. DOE contract no. DE-AC52-06NA25396. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0118 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2022.0118 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .