CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Beyond Stability: Performance, Efficiency and Disturbance Management for Smart Infrastructure Systems

基础设施网络是现代世界的基础。它们在不耗尽有限自然资源的情况下继续可靠和有效地发挥作用，对美国的安全、持续增长和技术进步至关重要。目前，由于人口增长、信息技术一体化的扩大以及采用可持续做法的动机增加等趋势的碰撞，这些系统处于快速变化的状态。这些趋势既带来了令人兴奋的潜在好处，也带来了危险的挑战。增加的传感、通信和计算能力有望提高“智能”基础设施系统的可靠性、效率和可持续性。与此同时，电力系统中的可再生能源、自动驾驶汽车和软件定义通信网络等新技术正在考验当前运营和市场政策的极限。快速变化的系统组件套件可能会导致新的、不可预见的交互，从而导致不稳定、性能下降或灾难性的故障。要实现这些系统的全部效益，就需要从现有的侧重于孤立地分析每个感兴趣的方面的方法转变为一种更全面的观点，包括所有相关因素，如稳定性、稳健性、性能和效率，并考虑到人类参与者的存在。该项目为构建分析、设计和控制工具提供了研究路线图，以确保下一代基础设施系统中计算算法、物理组件和人类交互的无缝集成。尽管对大规模分布式系统的稳定性问题进行了大量的研究，但对这些系统的性能、鲁棒性和效率问题的研究却很少，特别是那些具有异构组件和人类参与者的系统。本研究采用耦合振荡器系统作为通用建模框架来(i)表征基础设施系统的稳定性和性能，以及（ii）开发分布式控制器，通过隔离干扰和优化性能目标来保证性能、效率和鲁棒性。实际的解决办法要求理论与必要的经济机制紧密结合，以激励用户提高系统的稳定性、效率和可靠性；因此，这项工作还将包括经济控制的设计。为了奠定上述的数学基础、理论和算法，结果将应用于三个目标基础设施网络，其中耦合振荡器模型在设计和控制中发挥了基础作用：电力、通信和运输系统。这种方法允许开发跨领域的基本原则，这些原则可以应用于特定问题的边界，并确保研究对这些特定的基础设施网络产生影响。该项目还将把概念纳入现有的本科和研究生课程。

Infrastructure networks are the foundation of the modern world. Their continued reliable and efficient function without exhausting finite natural resources is critical to the security, continued growth and technological advancement of the United States. Currently these systems are in a state of rapid flux due to a collision of trends such as growing populations, expanding integration of information technology, and increasing motivation to adopt sustainable practices. These trends beget both exciting potential benefits and dangerous challenges. Added sensing, communication, and computational capabilities hold the promise of increased reliability, efficiency and sustainability from "smart" infrastructure systems. At the same time, new technologies such as renewable energy resources in power systems, autonomous vehicles, and software defined communication networks, are testing the limits of current operational and market policies. The rapidly changing suite of system components can cause new, unforeseen interactions that can lead to instability, performance deterioration, or catastrophic failures. Achieving the full benefits of these systems will require a shift from the existing focus on approaches that analyze each aspect of interest in isolation, to a more holistic view that encompasses all of the relevant factors such as stability, robustness, performance and efficiency, and takes into account the presence of human participants. This project provides a research roadmap to construct analysis, design and control tools that ensure the seamless integration of computational algorithms, physical components and human interactions in next generation infrastructure systems. Although there has been a great deal of research on stability questions in large scale distributed systems, there has been little effort directed toward questions of performance, robustness and efficiency in these systems, especially those with heterogeneous components and human participants. This research employs coupled oscillator systems as a common modeling framework to (i) characterize stability and performance of infrastructure systems, and (ii) develop distributed controllers that guarantee performance, efficiency and robustness by isolating disturbances and optimizing performance objectives. Practical solutions require that the theory be tightly integrated with the economic mechanisms necessary to incentivize users to enhance system stability, efficiency and reliability; therefore the work will also include the design of economic controls. In order to ground the mathematical foundations, theory and algorithms described above, the results will be applied to three target infrastructure networks where coupled oscillator models have played a foundational role in design and control: power, communication, and transportation systems. This approach allows the development of cross-cutting, fundamental principles that can be applied across problem specific boundaries and ensures that the research makes an impact on these specific infrastructure networks. This project will also incorporate concepts into existing undergraduate and graduate courses.