LaTeX: An Indispensable Tool in an Engineer’s Kit

Frustrated with the way the AmericanMathematical Society modified the look of his publications, in 1977, Donald Knuth,Professor Emeritus from Dept. of Computer Science at Stanford University began to de-velop a program called “Tex” (pronounced‘tech’), to ensure that

complex mathematical equations and text

would look exactly the way he wantedthemto appear in print [1]. A comprehensive version of TeX was made available by 1982. TeX is versatile andsuitable for typesetting various types of documents suchas journal articles, books, presentations, and letters.LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) is a set of macros de-signed by Dr. Leslie Lamport, currently with MicrosoftCorporation Inc., using TeX as the typesetting engine.LaTeX is now one of the most preferred forms of typeset-ting for many mathematically intensive books and journal publications.

Advantages of LaTeX:

•

Professional quality output that does not vary withdifferent operating systems.

•

Easy generation of complex multiline mathematicalequations, bibliography, footnotes, headers, and footers

•

Several freely available “add-on-the-fly” packages for accomplishing every task a “regular text editor” can do,and much, much more…

Disadvantages of LaTeX:

•

Takes plenty of practice to get familiar with commands(even though with the current freely available LaTeXeditors, this has become easier)

•

It’s a programming language, so be ready to “debug”your code, if your output does not look the way youwanted it to.In my opinion however, the merits far outweigh the de-merits. Several LateX editors like TeXnicCenter, Led, andTeXmaker are freely available. Help is just a click (insome cases a library) away from the installation of LaTeXeditors to producing final output files in portable docu-ment format (pdf). Good Luck and Happy

LaTeXing

…

By Vishnu Nanduri

[1] T.Oetiker et al., ‘The Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX 2

’, June 30

,2007,http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century Science andEngineering Discovery

In 1984, when I was 11, my father boughtme my first scientific calculator IK-82 for anequivalent of about 10% of his monthly Engi-neer's salary. The next day, I began my cyber-enabled exploration of science during amath test, which consisted of trigonometricfunction calculations of tricky angles, like 42

36’15’’! I wasdone after 15 minutes while the rest of the class sweated muchlonger using old Bradis' tables for their calculations. Flashforward 23 years. Many OR researchers are still using“Bradis' tables” - their desktops, to do “not-so-real-life'' engi-neering innovations. But a paradigm shift has happened re-cently, bringing unprecedented computing capabilities viafancily named tera and petascale cyberinfrastructure (CI). The purpose of this article is to give the reader general awarenessof CI and its opportunities.

What is CI?

CI consists of computing systems, data reposito-ries, visualization environments, and people, all linked to-gether by software and powerful networks, to enable research breakthroughs which are otherwise impossible. Being an in-frastructure, CI intends to provide basic support, and the ideais that scientists eventually will be able to use it withoutthought – just as you do when you plug an appliance into anelectrical outlet without having to comprehend the intricaciesof electricity generation and conduction. But it will take usyears to be able to use CI without substantial knowledge of itsintricacies.

Facilities:

Since NSF coined the term in 2003, it has beenactively pushing CI and a special Office of Cyberinfrastruc-ture (OCI) was created for this purpose. Currently, NSF super-vises the TeraGrid project -- a cybernet with more than 250teraflops of computing horsepower and more than 30 petabytes (quadrillions of bytes) of online and archival datastorage, with rapid access and retrieval over high-performancenetworks. As it is now, the TeraGrid is the world's largest andmost comprehensive distributed CI for open scientific explo-ration. TeraGrid is coordinated through the University of Chi-cago, with partner providers at Indiana University, Oak Ridge National Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applica-tions, Pittsburgh, Purdue, San Diego Supercomputing Center,Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Chicago/Argonne National Lab, and the National Center for Atmos- pheric Research.

(See

Cyber

page 2

)

V olu m e 1, Issue 2 F all 2007

I nsid e t his iss ue:

Electro nic ga m es:So m et hi ng m ore t ha n a waste of ti m e R esearc h o n d ereg ulated po wer m ar kets

A Monthly Newsletter from Student Chapter of INFORMS @ IMSE, USF

Faculty Corner…………….. The Committee Column

News Feature

Cyber (Continued from Page 1)What is in it for us?

In summer 2007, NSF put up a $22Msolicitation for Accelerating Discovery In Science and En-gineering through Petascale Simulations And Analysis(PetaApps) proposals. The solicitation sought proposals todevelop the future

simulation,

optimization and analysistools

that can use emerging petascale computing to ad-vance the frontiers of scientific and engineering research.Examples of research problems included nature's interac-tions scaling from sub-particles to galactic, from subcellu-lar to biosphere, complex biological systems, and dynamicsof chaotic and complex social systems. In response to thisrequest, Drs. Das and Savachkin submitted a collaborativeUSF-Purdue-Rutgers proposal to address the challenge of mitigating cross-regional pandemic outbreaks via a petas-cale hierarchical simulation-based optimization framework.IMSE doctoral students D. Prieto and A. Uribe are an ac-tive part of this project.

Future:

Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) is NSF’s 2007-2012 $250M initiative to further propeladvances in

computational thinking

encompassing relevantconcepts, methods, models, algorithms, and tools. Collec-tively, CDI multidisciplinary research outcomes are ex- pected to produce revolutionary shifts in our understandingof a wide range of science and engineering phenomena andsocio-technical innovations. In addition, NSF will be spon-soring yearly Cyberinfrastructure Experiences for Gradu-ates (CIEG) 10-week summer programs at national super-computing centers (San-Diego, in 2006) for doctoral engi-neering students to gain experience with CI tools.Flash backward 60 years to 1947. So much for aShockley-Bardeen-Brattain's invention.

Alex Savachkin

Assistant Prof. Industrial Engineering

First of all I need to make clear the fol-lowing: I am not an “electronic gamesfreak” and this column does not intend toadvocate the consumption of them. How-ever, some researches have found a veryinteresting use for them that goes beyond just spending a whole Sunday afternoonin front of the TV or computer pressing buttons (like someof my roommates love to do). Dr. Nina Fefferman, an epi-demiologist at Princeton University is using the CorruptedBlood outbreak in World of Warcraft to help her study and predict behavior of real world pandemics. First time I readabout it, it sounded kind of far-fetched, but on a secondthought it kind of made sense, after all games are simula-tion models (from a very academic perspective).Some months ago, the “corrupted blood” disease spreadrapidly within the online game World of Warcraft, killingoff thousands of players in an uncontrolled plague. Theinfection raged, wreaking social chaos, despite quarantinemeasures. The researches identified a diversity of re-sponses to the threat of infection such as: some players fledfrom infected cities, others rushed to the help of other play-ers (risking infection themselves), and others deliberatelyspread the disease.For all of us who have developed simulation models, itis clear that one of the hardest parts is to incorporate human behavior to our model and more so, to assign numericalvalues associated with these types of behavior. It is in thisregard, that Dr. Fefferman sees a great research opportu-nity. Furthermore, the game provides a way to experimentand try different scenarios of infection, given that it would be unethical to release an infectious disease in real life andsee what happens.Most of current pandemic models are built from themitigation point of view, conversely the game provides aframework to study the infection spread from the human behavior perspective. It is evident that a game does not re-semble 100% what takes place in real life (people can be-have in a riskier way than in a game). However, what simu-lation model actually does it?Therefore, next time you see someone totally absent-minded playing a game, do not rush to conclusions. Itcould be one of your colleagues studying some scenariosfor a simulation model.More info about Dr. Fefferman can be found at:

http://www.tufts.edu/med/phfm/faculty/fefferman-nina.htm http://www.math.princeton.edu/~feferman/ By Patricio Rocha

Electronic games: something more than just a waste of time!!

( S o l u t i o n t o P u z z l e )

N = 7 4 9 1 b a g s ! ! B y c o n s i d e r i n g a c e r t a i n n u m - b e r o f c o i n s f r o m a l l b a g s a t e a c h w e i g h i n g , w e c a n u s e a c o m b i n a t i o n o f t h e 3 w e i g h i n g t o i d e n t i f y t h e b a g w i t h f a u l t y c o i n s . T o d o s o t h e r a t i o o f t h e n u m b e r o f c o i n s t a k e n f r o m e a c h b a g a t e a c h o f t h e w e i g h - i n g m u s t b e u n i q u e . F o r e . g . : i f y o u t a k e 3 , 6 , 9 c o i n s f r o m b a g 1 f o r t h e 3 t r i a l s y o u c a n n o t t a k e 1 , 2 , 3 f r o m a n o t h e r b a g . S i n c e w e h a v e 1 0 c o i n s i n e a c h b a g t h e t o t a l n u m b e r o f p o s s i b l e c o m b i n a t i o n s i s [ 2 0 * 2 0 * 2 0 - c o m m o n r a t i o s ] = 7 4 9 1 ( 2 0 b e c a u s e i t c a n b e p l a c e d o n e i t h e r t h e l e f t o r r i g h t p a n s ) . T h e d i f f e r e n c e i n w e i g h t a t e a c h t r i a l w i l l b e p r o p o r - t i o n a l t o o n e o f t h e c o m b i n a t i o n s , a n d t h e b a g f r o m w h i c h t h i s c o m b i - n a t i o n w a s t a k e n i s t h e o n e w i t h f a u l t y c o i n s .

The deregulation of the electric power market has brought about sweeping changes to a traditionallymonopolistic industry. The industries are moving from vertically-integrated-government-controlledmonopolies to horizontally-integrated-free market based corporations. Governments and industries are beginning to realize that restructuring the power market to provide open and flexible trading that en-courages vigorous and fair competition in power supply is beneficial in the long run. Hence the worldis moving towards more accessible, flexible and free markets, where trading of electricity can take place akin to other commodity markets. The presence of multiple participants vying for the same reve-nue resources enables the growth of a healthy competition. This consequently increases the quality and value of the ser-vices being offered. What is commonly referred to as the

deregulated power market

is actually a collection of variousmarkets such as energy market and transmission market, differing only in the commodity being traded, the time frameand geographical location.The move towards a deregulated electric power industry has raised the awareness of the critical impact of transmis-sion congestion on power networks. Limitations in the transmission grid constrain long-distance movement of power,which results in higher prices in certain locations of the network. This phenomenon is termed as transmission conges-tion, and the difference in the Locational Marginal Prices (LMPs) between any two busses is called congestion cost(transmission charge). Electricity markets use various transmission right mechanisms such as Financial TransmissionRights (FTR), to hedge the market participants from the volatility of the transmission charges.The auction is the central mechanism of the power markets. In FTR market, market participants submit cost infor-mation and points of injection and delivery in the form of bids, to the independent system operator (ISO). The ISO beingthe neutral party arbiter runs an FTR auction to allocate the FTRs. The bids are allocated such that they maximize therevenue from FTR sales while satisfying the simultaneous feasibility condition. As a result, the bidding behaviors of the participants become significant. Bidders make their decisions based on anticipated system operating conditions whileholding FTRs. Similarly, in energy market ISO receives bids of cost information from the generators and allocates theelectric production among the generators to minimize the total cost to the consumers. Our research concerns developingcomprehensive matrix game models for scenarios where bidders compete with each other to maximize their profit over the FTR and energy markets. Equilibrium bidding strategies for the markets are found by using a value iteration basedreinforcement learning algorithm, also developed through our research team.A two-tier matrix game theoretic approach of modeling FTR and energy allocation among competing generators andother market participants is novel and has not been attempted before. Also the value learning based algorithm to solvefor market equilibrium allows examination of much larger network scenarios than those in the literature.This work ispartially supported by a grant to Dr. Tapas K. Das from the National Science Foundation #ECS 0400268.By Cihan Babayigit

International Multicultural Luncheon Fundraiser on September 7th 2007

Research corner

Equilibrium Bidding Strategies in Deregulated Electric Power Markets

N = 7 4 9 1

3INFORMS officers at the “International Lunch” Professors and students enjoy a multicultural cuisine