In the Fall of 2010, Prof. Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Prof. Amro M. Farid teamed up to collaborate on smart power grids. For Prof. Youcef-Toumi, as director of the Mechatronics Research Laboratory and co-director for the MIT-KFUPM Center for Clean Water and Energy, this was a natural extension of his existing research. For Prof. Farid, this was a natural shift of application domain from the control, automation and systems engineering of manufacturing system to energy systems. Many of the recent research outputs featured within the LIINES smart power grid research theme are the rich fruits from this successful collaboration. Today, on February 5th, both professors were invited to feature their collaboration at the 9th Annual Carnegie Mellon Conference on the Electricity Industry: The Role of Distributed Coordination in Resilient & Fine-Grain Control of Power Grids.
The first presentation entitled “A Multi-Agent System Transient Stability Platform for Resilient Self-Healing Operation of Multiple Microgrids” was delivered by Prof. Youcef-Toumi. This work combines multi-agent system techniques from the field of distributed artificial intelligence with transient stability analysis from power systems engineering. It recognizes that power grids are operated by multiple independent stakeholders be they independent power producers, semi-autonomous microgrids, full-scale utilities or whole countries. Each has jurisdiction and control over its respective area even though the physical grids are electrically connected. Hence, the multiple stakeholders must coordinate and collaborate with distributed control techniques in order to assure technical reliability. The interested reader is referred to the publications led by Dr. Sergio Rivera on the LIINES website for further information.
The second presentation entitled “An Enterprise Control Approach for the Assessment of Variable Energy Resource Induced Power System Imbalances” was delivered by Prof. Farid. This presentation reiterates the need for enterprise control techniques when assessing and mitigating the power system imbalances induced by the integration of variable energy resources like wind and solar PV. It showed that when the power system’s primary, secondary and tertiary control are considered simultaneously, accurate and insightful conclusions can be made about the techno-economic viability of VER integration. These conclusions overcome many of the limitations of existing methodologies found in recent renewable energy integration studies. The interested reader is referred to the publications lead by Dr. Aramazd Muzhikyan on the LIINES website for further information.
These lectures follow similar inivited lectures at MIT and the Czech Technical University in Prague. Full text of the background reference papers may be found on the LIINES publication page: http://liines.net
LIINES Website: http://liines.net
