SGER: Cooperative Control: New Alternatives for the Second Wave of the Power System Revolution

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9615599 Talukdar This is a proposal to do preliminary work on an untested and novel idea: to use autonomous, cooperating agents to control future electric power systems. In today's power systems, controllers are arranged in hierarchy. Controllers in higher levels adjust the set points of controllers in lower levels. But the controllers are not allowed to cooperate (interact). That is, controllers cannot help one another to do a better job. Specifically, no two controllers can adjust the value of any system variable in the same time frame. This precaution is taken to minimize the risk of instability. Any control problem can be formulated as an optimization problem. The authors of this proposal have shown that convergence to good solutions of optimization problems is an emergent behavior of certain mixes of autonomous agents, and much better solutions are obtained when the agents are allowed to cooperate in certain ways. The implication is that much more effective control of power systems could be achieved by autonomous controllers, provided these controllers cooperate in the right way. The proposed work is to provide a proof-of-concept for this idea and identify the forms of cooperation that would provide control advantages. If successful, this work will open a new research area--cooperative control--and take the first step in dramatically changing the way power systems are controlled. Emerging hardware technologies, such as flexible AC transmission systems, electric storage, and fuel cells, make cooperative control feasible. Many of these technologies are already in the demonstration stage. Once they reach the deployment stage, it will probably be too late to introduce a new control technique. Therefore, it is imperative that the preliminary investigation of the idea of cooperative control be undertaken immediately. ***