Distributed Control of Large Power Networks
In this project new distributed system modeling techniques are proposed to faithfully capture the physical and communication system characteristics as well as the "wave" like propagation of some disturbances for large power networks. These new mathematical approaches lead us to propose new control laws that seek to minimize the impact of disturbances. It is also an integration of various areas related to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), such as control, communications and computing, within the same framework.
The following tasks are studied:
(a) Partial Difference Equation (PdE) framework: To model the impact of network topology on the power system stability, we propose to model the power system dynamics using PdE due to the powerful modeling capability and abundant mathematical tools. Both randomness and switching in the PdE model will be considered. In particular, the focus is on the PdE versions of diffusion and wave equations.
(b) Design of communication network: We propose to study how to design the communication infrastructure based on the PdE modeling. The focus is on the communication network topology and the communication delay. Optimization problems will be formulated to obtain the optimal tradeoff between the system performance and the communication infrastructure cost.
(c) Design of control network: We plan to address the challenges of fast response, resource constraints, platform heterogeneity, dynamic network topology and data processing in power networks. We propose to apply the techniques of distributed feedback linearization, delay-combating control laws, observability analysis, distributed control scheme, within the framework of PdE.
(d) Design of the computing network: we plan to address the computation cost for controlling the power network. In particular, we study the communication complexity for controlling the power network in both cases of one-snapshot computation and iterative computations. In contrast to traditional communication complexity studies, the proposed research is featured by the multiple hops and arbitrary network topologies.
(e) Test and evaluation: we modify various systems such as both small scale system models of several hundred buses and very large system models of 50,000 buses based loosely on the entire North American systems to reflect the proposed modeling advances and the new communication overlays.