The objective of this research is to establish a foundational framework for smart grids that enables significant penetration of renewable DERs and facilitates flexible deployments of plug-and-play applications, similar to the way users connect to the Internet. The approach is to view the overall grid management as an adaptive optimizer to iteratively solve a system-wide optimization problem, where networked sensing, control and verification carry out distributed computation tasks to achieve reliability at all levels, particularly component-level, system-level, and application level. Intellectual merit. Under the common theme of reliability guarantees, distributed monitoring and inference algorithms will be developed to perform fault diagnosis and operate resiliently against all hazards. To attain high reliability, a trustworthy middleware will be used to shield the grid system design from the complexities of the underlying software world while providing services to grid applications through message passing and transactions. Further, selective load/generation control using Automatic Generation Control, based on multi-scale state estimation for energy supply and demand, will be carried out to guarantee that the load and generation in the system remain balanced. Broader impact. The envisioned architecture of the smart grid is an outstanding example of the CPS technology. Built on this critical application study, this collaborative effort will pursue a CPS architecture that enables embedding intelligent computation, communication and control mechanisms into physical systems with active and reconfigurable components. Close collaborations between this team and major EMS and SCADA vendors will pave the path for technology transfer via proof-of-concept demonstrations.

The national transmission networks that deliver high voltage electric power underpin our society and are central to the ongoing transformation of the American energy infrastructure. Transmission networks are very large and complicated engineering systems, and "keeping the lights on" as the transformation of the American energy infrastructure proceeds is a fundamental engineering challenge involving both the physical aspects of the equipment and the cyber aspects of the controls, communications, and computers that run the system. The project develops new principles of cyber-physical engineering by focusing on instabilities of electric power networks that can cause blackouts. It proposes novel approaches to analyze these instabilities and to design cyber-physical control methods to monitor, detect, and mitigate them. The controls must perform robustly in the presence of variability and uncertainty in electric generation, loads, communications, and equipment status, and during abnormal states caused by natural faults or malicious attacks. The research produces cyber-physical engineering methodologies that specifically help to mitigate power system blackouts and more generally show the way forward in designing robust cyber-physical systems in environments characterized by rich dynamics and uncertainty. Education and outreach efforts involve students at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels, as well as dissemination of results to the public and the engineering and applied science communities in industry, government and universities.