Computing Safe Dike Heights at Minimal Costs.

Kees Roos
Delft University of Technology

Friday, October 16 at 11:00am
Engr IV Room 57-124

Abstract
Safe dike heights are crucial for protecting life in the Netherlands and many other regions of the world. We discuss issues that arise when modeling the probability of floods, the expected damage and measures to prevent floods. Our aim is to minimize the sum of future investing costs and expected damage over a long period (of about 300 years). We present some MINLP optimization models and a dynamic programming model, as well as some computational results.

Biography
Kees Roos (1941) has held a chair on Optimization Technology at Delft University of Technology until 2006, when he retired. From 1998 to 2002 he was a part-time professor at Leiden University. The past 25 years his research concentrated on interior-point methods for linear and convex optimization. He is a (co-)author of several books and more than hundred papers in refereed journals. He is (or was) member of the editorial board of several journals, among them the SIAM Journal on Optimization. He was secretary/treasurer of the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization. He supervised a large number of research projects, among them the Dutch nationwide NWO-project High Performance Methods for Mathematical Optimization and the project Discrete Mathematics and Optimization of the (Dutch) Stieltjes Institute. Recently he was involved in a big project "Optimal safety of the dikes in the Netherlands", financed by the Dutch government.