The LIINES Research Program is currently concerned with the sustainability and resilience of five classes of intelligent multi-energy engineering systems.
- Smart Power Grids: As a full energy value chain including power generation, power transmission & distribution and building systems. Electricity currently accounts for 29% of U.S. CO₂ emissions.
- Energy-Water Nexus: Focusing on points of interconnection including power generation, desalination, water pumping and building systems. Electricity currently accounts for 49% of U.S. water withdrawals.
- Electrified Transportation Systems: Focusing on electric vehicles as a point of interconnection. Transportation currently accounts for 27% of U.S. CO₂ emissions.
- Industrial & Supply Chain Energy Management: Automated approaches to energy management industrial production & service delivery. Manufacturing currently accounts for 21% of U.S. CO₂ emissions.
- Interdependent Smart City Infrastructures: This research theme represents a concerted effort to generalize sustainability, resilience, to the emerging need for integrated smart cities. U.S. cities are home to 62.7% of the population but comprise just 3.5% of the land area.
As populations grow and densify, our cities’ engineering systems must be increasingly integrated to reliably and efficiently deliver their respective services. Doing so in the context of climate change mitigation and adaptation requires a simultaneous commitment to sustainability and resilience. Traditionally, managers have implemented such complex decisions in manual plan-do-check-act loops that lack the ability to make interconnected, timely, and coordinated decisions.
Enterprise Control: To make timely techno-economic decisions, many successful enterprises use enterprise control to automate a hierarchical structure of control, automation, and IT at multiple time scales.
Heterofunctional Networks: To make interconnected decisions across multiple engineering systems, it is important to not just distinguish network structures but their hetero-functionality as well.
Internet of Things: To make coordinated distributed decisions, many enterprises are moving to produce, connect, and control internet-enabled “things” across all engineering systems.
Application Areas – Research Themes
Disciplinary Expertise: Our laboratory maintains disciplinary expertise in the application of modeling, simulation, data science, optimization, decision and control systems to intelligent multi-energy engineering systems. This expertise results upon:
- Modeling of Dynamic Systems: The techno-economic modeling of dynamic systems across multiple application and energy domains.
- Graph Theory: The study of the network sciences and its measures.
- Model Based Systems Engineering — Design Methodologies for Large Complex Systems: The application of systems engineering and design methodologies for the engineering of integrated control, automation and IT solutions for physical systems.
- Control Systems Engineering: The design of robust control strategies for time-driven, event-driven, and hybrid systems.
- Operations Management & Research: The operations and planning of large scale complex networks on the basis of mathematical programming/optimization.
- Technology Policy: The support of policy objectives in energy, water, transportation and industry through the lens of technology adoption, facilitation, and standards.
