PhD Thesis Proposal: Lilly Yang

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"Sustainable Systems Planning: Optimization & mechanism design for emission reduction"

Abstract

Greenhouse gas emissions are near historically high levels, underscoring the urgency for effective strategies to mitigate their adverse environmental impacts. This thesis addresses this challenge by designing two sustainable systems by leveraging the methodologies drawn from optimization and mechanism design.

The first part designs a household-level food waste management system that optimizes food waste disposal methods to achieve a reduction in methane emissions. First, a stylized model is developed to analytically determine the optimal allocation of households between decentralized disposal methods (such as backyard treatment and feeding animals) and centralized disposal methods (namely, pick-up services subscription). Then extensive computational studies are performed using real-world case study data from Chittenden County in Vermont and fast optimization algorithms to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and highlight its potential in practice to significantly lower environmental costs.

The second part develops a decision-making framework for the energy transition in fragile states with the aim of reducing greenhouse emissions from the use of diesel generators. A multi-objective optimization model is formulated to identify the three-dimensional Pareto frontier that balances stakeholders' conflicting priorities of sustainability, cost effectiveness, and access to electricity. Using the majority judgment algorithm, the winner is determined through both mathematical computation and a practical iterative voting procedure.

These systems offer actionable information for policy-makers and a suite of novel methodological approaches to researchers, in order to address critical environmental and energy challenges.

Thesis Committee

• Prof. Vikrant Vaze (chair)
• Prof. Laurens Debo
• Prof. Klaus Keller

Contact

For more information, contact Thayer Registrar at thayer.registrar@dartmouth.edu.