Dear All,
We are pleased to invite you to the IEOR Seminar by Dr. Saif Kazi (Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory). The details are given below.
Title: Nonlinear Optimization for Energy Systems and Networks
Speaker: Dr. Saif Kazi (Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Date & time: 21 April, 2026, Tuesday, 9 am
Venue: Online seminar
Meeting link for the seminar: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/49473231843587?p=Bfuvcgs2Ft6wKQZivD
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss my research on three different projects about optimization of
energy system networks. 1) Trust Region Algorithm for Heat Exchanger Network
Synthesis - This is a classical design optimization problem in process engineering to
minimize the utility cost by matching hot and cold streams, but it omits the details of unit
exchanger design. I will present the trust region algorithm and it's application on
embedding detailed exchanger design models (black box) inside nonlinear constrained
optimization using surrogate modeling and trust region filter. 2) Stochastic Finite
Volume method for Gas Pipeline Network Optimization - Uncertainty quantification
in network optimization is modeled as a stochastic programming problem with a chance
constraint formulation. I will discuss a numerical discretization based scheme to
reformulate the chance constraint into a nonlinear constraint and solved as a NLP. 3)
Verification of Neural Network using Complementarity Constraint - I will discuss
the verification problem of trained neural networks which can be modeled as a mixed
integer linear problem. In this work, I will present an alternate formulation using
complementarity constraints for ReLU networks which can be scaled for large scale
neural networks albeit with some convergence issues.
Bio: Saif R. Kazi is a research scientist in the Applied Mathematics group at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory. He obtained his PhD and bachelor's degree in engineering
from Carnegie Mellon University and IIT Bombay in 2021 and 2016 respectively.
Subsequently, he joined as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies in
Los Alamos. He has co-authored 20+ publications with 300+ citations.