6. Applications

Here are just a few of the most spectacular applications.

• Optimizing power generation

  In France, around 200 EDF power plants (nuclear, conventional thermal, hydro) are in operation every day. Optimization is used to calculate their production schedule for the following day, so as to produce and transmit at the lowest cost the energy needed to satisfy a presumed known demand. Stochastic versions of this problem exist, with horizons ranging from one week to one year.

• Molecular Biology

  An important problem in pharmacology is to determine the geometry of a molecule whose chemical formula is known (a drug, for example). For this problem, optimization is used in the following way. If the position in space of the atoms of this molecule were...