Subject to: Andy Philpott

Subject to

Andy Philpott is world expert in optimization under uncertainty and its application in electricity systems. He is the Director of the Electric Power Optimization Centre (EPOC) at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His work covers a broad range of topics from game-theoretical analyses of electricity market auctions to modelling competition and market power in electricity systems dominated by stored hydroelectricity. Philpott’s EPOC group (www.epoc.org.nz) has been a research leader in this field for 20 years. He has consulted throughout the world on electricity optimization to organizations as diverse as EDF, BC Hydro, Hydro Tasmania, Meridian Energy, Contact Energy, Norske Skog, and the New Zealand Electricity Authority. Philpott’s research has been motivated by practical problems faced by industry that require some theoretical insight to resolve. This has led to a collection of theoretical publications in top operations research journals. At the same time work has had a significant impact. In 2009 Philpott and a team from Norske Skog were finalists in the Franz Edelman competition for their development (from 1997-2008) and deployment of Norske Skog’s PIVOT model. The recommendations emerging from this model saved Norske Skog an estimated (USD)100 M per annum. Philpott has been honoured for his research, being awarded the Hans Daellenbach Award from ORSNZ in 2006, elected to be an INFORMS Fellow in 2017, and a Simons Fellow in 2019. He has given plenary and keynote addresses to major international conferences such as ICSP 2001, ICCOPT 2007, ICSP 2010, SIAM Conference on Optimization 2014, CMS 2018, ISMP 2018, and the IFORS Distinguished Lecture in 2019. He was on the editorial board of Mathematical Programming from 2004-2017, and has been an Associate Editor of Operations Research since 2007. He has served on numerous INFORMS committees (including chairing the Farkas Prize Committee and the INFORMS ENRE Best Paper Prize Committee) and organized several international workshops and thematic programmes. The latest of these was the Mathematics of Energy Systems programme held at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2019.