CREST: Interdisciplinary Center for Research Excellence in Design of Intelligent Technologies for Smartgrids Phase II

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The Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology program provides support to enhance the research capabilities of minority-serving institutions through the establishment of centers that effectively integrate education and research. With National Science Foundation support, New Mexico State University will build on the accomplishments of their Phase I Center by engaging in research focused on scalable approaches to the realization of microgrids and networks of microgrids, that meet criteria of security, reliability, and resilience. Phase II Center investigators will conduct collaborative research to explore transformations of existing electricity distribution infrastructures into interconnected intelligent microgrids.The Phase II Center addresses design, operational, and security challenges of next generation electric power production and delivery, providing sustainability, reliability, and resilience against low-probability, high-impact events. The Center articulates three research strands, and a fourth integration effort. The Modeling, Operation and Integration strand addresses the lack of standardized physical design and operation approaches for customer-centric distribution microgrid architectures and creates designs that balance sustainability, economy, and reliability. The Security and Resilience Frameworks strand defines the architectural frameworks necessary to realize security and resilience, providing constraints on the models and algorithms from the other research strands. The Data-Driven Decision-Making strand implements the data-information-knowledge-decision flow to support operation and control of the customer-centric distribution microgrid, optimizing for resilience and enabling user-centered and transactive behavior. All research strands converge to investigate interactions and to validate the software and hardware implementations developed.The Center at New Mexico State University will strive to become a leader in the creation of sustainable, integrated and comprehensive learning pathways in customer-centric distribution microgrid and critical cyberphysical systems. The Phase II Center addresses underrepresentation by expanding the research and training pipeline and introducing specialized mentoring and retention mechanisms. New Mexico State University will also enhance competency by infusing smartgrids expertise in a range of academic programs.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.