PC3: Designing a Smarter and Greener Electric Grid: A Sensor-data Driven Approach

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This award provides funding for a collaborative project between University of Massachussetes, Amherst and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. There has recently been an increasing focus on developing new technologies for a more sustainable future for our society. In this context, the design of new Information and Communication technologies hold particular promise for designing the sustainable systems of tomorrow. This project will address key research challenges in the design of a smarter and greener electric grid, specifically focusing on pervasive computing and communication issues that arise both in the ?core? and on the "edge" of the smart grid. The intellectual merit of the effort is to bring a multi-disciplinary approach to addressing problems in data collection, dissemination, monitoring, and demand-response for the grid, with a common theme being a data-driven methodology using data obtained from measurements to drive actuation/control, optimization or resource management to address problems for the smart grid and smart homes that interface with the grid. The project's activities span three inter-related topics: (i) measurement and monitoring for the smart-grid, (ii) data dissemination architectures for the smart grid and (iii) demand-response for smart residential and office buildings. The broader impacts of this project include (i) industrial internship opportunities with industrial collaborators for student researchers, enabling them to work on practical problems in this area, (ii) developing a three-credit course on computing and networking technologies for the smart grid, offered jointly between UMass and IIT Bombay and building on the smart-grid reading group that has been jointly conducted for the past year, and (iii) organizing a smart grid workshop in Holyoke MA, an economically disadvantaged gateway city with a large minority population, and a municipally-owned hydroelectric utility. The project is structured as, and will result in, an international collaboration between India and the US. Smart grid, smart homes and sustainability are important areas of research in both India and the USA; however there are numerous context-specific geographical issues that must be addressed in each country. Through collaboration and by leveraging each other?s insights, project participants will be able to develop research methods that are broadly applicable in international settings. US and Indian industry partners, which include utilities, research labs and power generation companies, will bring a real-world perspective to this project. This project is a part of pervasive communications and computing collaboration (PC3) initiative.