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G-2026-45

Micro-PRIAD: A power utility simulator for blackbox optimization benchmarking

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The field of Blackbox Optimization (BBO) lacks publicly available realistic engineering benchmark problems. This work proposes Micro-PRIAD, a collection of ten stochastic blackbox benchmark instances, of which nine are realistic industrial constrained problems. All ten are Monte Carlo (MC) simulation-based. Micro-PRIAD offers a simplified version of a complex and costly-to-evaluate asset management blackbox problem in development at Hydro-Québec (HQ). It reproduces the overall behaviour of this blackbox by simulating the application of electrical equipments maintenance strategies on power grids. For a given maintenance strategy, the simulation returns an operational cost to be minimized in an optimization context. During an evaluation of Micro-PRIAD, information is made available to a BBO solver at different key moments. Moreover, mechanisms that allow the solver to manipulate this intermediate information and interrupt the evaluation are provided. These features allow the benchmarking of solvers that will ultimately be used for difficult real-world HQ problems that possess these properties. Illustrative numerical results on Micro-PRIAD are presented to showcase complexity and its use for benchmarking.

, 30 pages

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