Growing complexity calls for a more sophisticated approach

As a consulting partner to many utility companies, Quanta Technology often encounters scenarios where legacy systems fall short.

“The utility space is usually, for planning purposes, using legacy tools,” said Andrija Sadikovic, Senior Director at Quanta Technology. “They are great tools, but when we talk about an optimal solution that encompasses a number of risk mitigation strategies, this is something that really cannot reside in those environments.”

Faced with growing system complexity and the constraints of outdated tools, Quanta Technology knew it needed a new approach. Partnering with Gurobi gave them the optimisation power to rethink what’s possible, allowing utilities to define data-driven action plans validated by mathematical analysis of the system’s digital twin.

From legacy systems to full scale optimisation

To overcome these limitations, Quanta Technology integrated Gurobi into its resiliency and reliability planning application. The application can consider options available to the utility for hardening, redundancy, and recovery as they relate to the cost of the modifications and their effects on restoration or outage avoidance, finding the optimal combination of cost and performance to achieve the objective.

The switch from legacy systems to advanced optimisation provided measurable gains in speed, volume, and scope. Gurobi’s performance enabled Quanta Technology to solve complex system models faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Zahra Soltani, Senior Engineer at Quanta, explained: “It took about 20 minutes. So that’s why we are using Gurobi. It’s really efficient and fast.”

This level of performance has allowed Quanta to work with full scale optimisation models containing millions of variables, without needing to break problems down or simplify excessively.

For Quanta, speed was not the only benefit. When faced with problems that could not be solved in the usual time frame, the team could diagnose and refine their models or network assumptions without resorting to decomposing the problem.

“If the problem cannot be solved in two hours, we’ll go back to check the network and see whether there’s something specific about that feeder,” added Shanshan Ma, Advisor at Quanta Technology. “We’ll also go back to check our model again to see whether we can make the problem smaller.”

Despite working with full optimisation models containing millions of decision variables, Quanta Technology found that they did not need advanced techniques like decomposition or network reduction.

“Currently, we do not consider [decomposition] because Gurobi already gives us a very good result. We do have network reduction approaches in our algorithm if needed, but so far, we have not seen that kind of problem,” Ma went on to say.

Empowering smart, scalable planning for the grid of tomorrow

With Gurobi, Quanta Technology is helping utilities make a critical shift from static legacy tools to more dynamic, optimisation-driven decision-making. The team supports planning projects across the US and continues to guide utilities toward more robust and scalable approaches.

“We have really great relations with many utilities in the US. We’re even helping them today to improve their processes with existing tools,” Sadikovic stated. “But slowly, the gaps are becoming transparent, and they’re converging toward using AI platforms like ours, powered by Gurobi.”

With Gurobi integrated into their workflow, Quanta Technology has redefined how they approach utility planning, unlocking new levels of modelling accuracy, computational efficiency, and scalability.

Together, Quanta Technology and Gurobi are providing utilities with a modern framework to make faster, smarter planning decisions, bridging the gap between legacy infrastructure and the demands of the future grid.

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Read the article online at: https://www.energyglobal.com/special-reports/12062025/quanta-technology-empowering-utilities-by-optimising-resilience-and-reliability-system-planning/