Power systems have seen many changes over the last decade including the increased penetration of renewable generation, electric vehicles and new technologies for sensing, communication and control of a Smart Grid. The most significant impact of these changes are being felt at the consumer level. The ability for consumers and end devices to buy and sell energy and related services in a dynamic and interactive manner is expected to create a transactive energy market as highlighted in the Dec 2014 report of GridWise Alliance. Modeling and preparing the physical system to respond to the somewhat unpredictable behavior of active consumers over a cyber-infrastructure will be critical for maintaining grid reliability. Understanding the impact of such active consumers on the operational and business policies of the distribution utility requires advances in core system science that spans the areas of power engineering, economics, statistical signal processing, game theory, distributed control, multi-agent systems and cyber security. In conjunction with industrial partners, Westar Energy (the largest electric company in Kansas) and Kansas City Power and Light, the PIs plan to develop an architecture that requires little change to the existing investment in power distribution systems while allowing for the dynamic, adaptive control required to integrate active consumers with current and future combinations of high-variability distributed power sources, such as Photo-voltaic (PV) generators and storage batteries. In contrast to prior related efforts that primarily focus on demand response and distributed generation management with a single home/user centric approach, the proposed approach takes a holistic system perspective that includes cumulative modeling of multiple stochastic active consumers and the cyber infrastructure over which they may interact. Specific research thrusts include: (1) a general, extensible, and secure cyber architecture based on holonic multi-agent principles that provides a pathway to the emerging area of transactive energy market in power distribution systems, but also provides foundation for other engineered systems with active consumers; (2) new analytical insights into generalized stochastic modeling of consumer response to real]time price of electricity and the impact of such active consumers on grid reliability and security, and (3) novel methodology for comprehensive distributed control and management of power distribution systems with active consumers and high penetration of distributed renewable resources. Active consumers are an integral part of the Smart City vision where cyber systems are integrated into the transportation, energy, healthcare and biomedical, and critical infrastructure systems. Successful completion of this project will result in modeling, control, analysis and simulation architectures for all such active consumer driven CPS domains. The resulting gains in operating efficiency, economics, reliability and security will result in overall welfare for the society.

Many practical systems such as smart grid, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and robotic networks can be categorized as cyber physical systems (CPS). A typical CPS consists of physical dynamics, sensors, communication network and controllers. The communication network is of key importance in CPS, since it mimics the nerve system in the human body. Hence, it is critical to study how the communication network in CPS should be analyzed and designed. Essentially, communications stem from the uncertainty of system under consideration; random perturbations increase the system uncertainty, which is reduced by the control actions in CPS. It is well known that entropy is a measure of system uncertainty. A unified framework of entropy is used for CPS, in which random perturbations create entropy while communications and controls provide negative entropy to compensate the entropy generation. The intellectual merits are the novel framework of entropy for bridging the communications and control in CPS and the new design criterion based on the entropy of system state for CPS. The project's broader significance and importance are the education of various levels of students, the dissemination of results to public, and the impact on everyday life such as the improved agility and robustness of power grids. This project applies the framework of entropy to study the interdependencies of communications and control, thus facilitating the analysis and design of communications in CPS. The following tasks are tackled in the project: (a) Entropy Flow Based Communication Capacity Analysis in which communications in CPS is analyzed by studying the entropy fields in the physical dynamics, thus providing an estimation on the scale (bits/second) of communication capacity budget; (b) Communication Network Topology Design in which the design of the network topology (either physical or logical) is tackled through both optimization-based or heuristic approaches; (c) Online Network Resource Scheduling which refines the network resource scheduling during the operation using both optimization-based and heuristic approaches, within the framework of entropy fields; (d) Hardware Emulation Testbed which delivers a co-simulation testbed based on real time digital power simulator (RTDS) and a communication simulator, in the context of smart grids. Based on the research, new courses are developed. K-12 outreach and various levels of undergraduate/graduate educations are incorporated into the research.