by Nikolai VOROPAI, RAS Corresponding Member, Director of the Melentyev Institute of Power Engineering Systems, RAS Siberian Branch, Irkutsk, Russia The date is August 19, 1960. On that day the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR passed a decision on a Siberian Power Institute to be set up in the city of Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia. In 1997 it changed its name, and since then it has been known as the Melentyev Institute of Power Engineering Systems working under the auspices of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. стр. 48 There were objective conditions for the setting up of our research institution half a century ago. By the mid-1950s an essentially new situation had obtained in the economy of the USSR and in other industrialized countries. Large territorial systems of electric power, gas, oil and heat supply were taking body and form. In time they merged into a single fuel-and-power complex, the backbone of the national economy. It was high time for fundamental interdisciplinary studies to cope with the inevitable systemic problems. Meanwhile the first electronic computers entered the stage, and computing mathematics was developing apace. All that opened up broad opportunities for addressing multiple tasks related to power supply systems with their nonlinear multifactorial and dynamic characteristics. There were also other objective causes why the new research center was established in Irkutsk particularly. From the mid-1950s on a major part of this country's power industry was being relocated to eastern regions. The oil and gas mining industries of Western Siberia were making rapid progress, and so were the power-generating stations of Eastern Siberia, including those within the Kansk-Achinsk fuel-and-power complex, and large hydraulic power stations along the Angara and Yenisei. Lev Alexandrovich Melentyev (1908-1986), the founder and the first director of our research institute, outlined thr ... Читать далее