Collaborative Research: Towards Communication-Cognizant Voltage Regulation and Energy Management for Power Distribution Systems

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Power distribution systems have continued to witness transformation in generation, consumption, and operational landscapes. Sustainability concerns are driving widespread integration of distributed renewable generation, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, demand-response programs, and advanced metering infrastructure. These emerging devices and resources have the potential to greatly improve operational efficiency and reliability with the aid of advanced communication, sensing, and computation capabilities. Nonetheless, distribution systems are equipped with limited cyber resources in communication, sensing, and computation. By and large, their supporting cyber infrastructure is, and continues to be, less reliable and less ubiquitous as compared to that for the bulk power transmission grid. Challenged by this status quo, this project will develop novel coordination algorithms for operating distribution systems, which are cognizant to the limited availability and low quality of the underlying communication and the cyber infrastructure in general in the foreseen future. Successful completion of this project will promote increased deployment of distributed energy resources and cyber infrastructures in distribution systems. In addition, results from this project will be shared with industry in order to have an impact on practice. Project results will also be employed in the development of educational materials for middle school students and a new undergraduate course.This project will develop communication-cognizant algorithms with provable performance in terms of stability, efficiency, and reliability. The algorithms will be designed to be robust to different imperfect communication scenarios, such as limited bandwidth, link failures, and communication delays, with graceful degradation performance. One key feature of the algorithms is the coordination between the coupled physical distribution systems and cyber communication networks. Building upon mathematical tools from optimization and control, the team plans to revitalize the algorithmic design by leveraging physical measurements to complement the cyber communication networks for accelerated information diffusion. The research project consists of four cohesive thrusts: (1) Developing and analyzing algorithms that use no communications; (2) Designing distributed algorithms to approach global efficiency; (3) Enabling robust designs against imperfect communication; and (4) Unifying theoretical analysis with real-world implementations, and coordinating the design of cyber-physical architectures. The project will deliver: (i) a suite of algorithmic tools under various realistic communication scenarios that incorporate models of key system components; (ii) performance analysis for the developed algorithms in an online and uncertain implementation; and (iii) algorithmic validations in a realistically represented numerical environment. The research will fulfill the objectives of advancing the operational goals of power distribution systems while allowing for practical communication architectures and algorithmic implementations under a more versatile and low investment environment.