CPS:Medium:Collaborative Research: Smart Power Systems of the Future: Foundations for Understanding Volatility and Improving Operational Reliability
Lead PI:
Munther Dahleh
Co-PI:
Abstract
This project addresses the impact of the integration of renewable intermittent generation in a power grid. This includes the consideration of sophisticated sensing, communication, and actuation capabilities on the system's reliability, price volatility, and economic and environmental efficiency. Without careful crafting of its architecture, the future smart grid may suffer from a decrease in reliability. Volatility of prices may increase, and the source of high prices may be more difficult to identify because of undetectable strategic policies. This project addresses these challenges by relying on the following components: (a) the development of tractable cross-layer models; physical, cyber, and economic, that capture the fundamental tradeoffs between reliability, price volatility, and economic and environmental efficiency, (b) the development of computational tools for quantifying the value of information on decision making at various levels, (c) the development of tools for performing distributed robust control design at the distribution level in the presence of information constraints, (d) the development of dynamic economic models that can address the real-time impact of consumer's feedback on future electricity markets, and finally (e) the development of cross-layer design principles and metrics that address critical architectural issues of the future grid. This project promotes modernization of the grid by reducing the system-level barriers for integration of new technologies, including the integration of new renewable energy resources. Understanding fundamental limits of performance is indispensable to policymakers that are currently engaged in revamping the infrastructure of our energy system. It is critical that we ensure that the transition to a smarter electricity infrastructure does not jeopardize the reliability of our electricity supply twenty years down the road. The educational efforts and outreach activities will provide multidisciplinary training for students in engineering, economics, and mathematics, and will raise awareness about the exciting research challenges required to create a sustainable energy future.
Munther Dahleh

Munther A. Dahleh was born in 1962. He received the B.S. degree from Texas A & M university, College Station, Texas in 1983, and his Ph.D. degree from Rice University, Houston, TX, in 1987, all in Electrical Engineering. Since then, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Com- puter Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, where he is now a full Professor. He is currently the associate EECS department head at MIT. Previously, he was the acting director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. He has been a visiting Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Califor- nia Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, for the Spring of 1993. He has held consulting positions with several companies in the US and abroad. Dr. Dahleh has been the recipient of the Ralph Budd award in 1987 for the best thesis at Rice University, George Axelby outstanding paper award (paper coauthored with J.B. Pearson in 1987), an NSF presidential young investigator award (1991), the Finmeccanica career development chair (1992) and the Don- ald P. Eckman award from the American Control Council in 1993, the Graduate Students Council teaching award in 1995, the George Axelby outstanding paper award (paper coauthored with Bamieh and Paganini in 2004), and the Hugo Schuck Award for Theory (for the paper coauthored with Martins). He became a fellow of IEEE in year 2000. He was a plenary speaker at the 1994 American Control Conference, at the Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automa- tion in 2003, at the MTNS in 2006, at SYSID in 2009, at Asian Control Con- ference in 2009, and at SING6 in 2010. He was an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions On Automatic Control and for Systems and Control Letters. He is the co-author (with Ignacio Diaz-Bobillo) of the book Control of Uncertain Systems: A Linear Programming Approach, published by Prentice-Hall, and the co-author (with Nicola Elia) of the book Computational Methods for Controller Design published by Springer. Dr. Dahleh is interested in problems at the interface of robust control, filter- ing, information theory, and computation which include control problems with communication constraints and distributed mobile agents with local decision capabilities. In addition to methodology development, he has been interested in the application of distributed control in the future electric grid and the future transportation system with particular emphasis in the management of systemic risk. He is also interested in various problems in network science including dis- tributed computation over noisy network as well as information propagation over complex engineering and social networks. He is also interested in model reduction problems for discrete-alphabet hidden Markov models and universal learning approaches for systems with both continuous and discrete alphabets. He is also interested in the interface between systems theory and neurobiology, and in particular, in providing an anatomically consistent model of the motor control system.

Performance Period: 10/01/2011 - 09/30/2016
Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Award Number: 1135843