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Monday, May 18, 2015
3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Colloquium

Connecting Distributed Control and Distributed Optimization in the Power Grid and General Network Systems

Na Li
Harvard University

Conventional operation of the power grid is hierarchical and divided into two vertical layers at different time scales. At the top decision-making layer, abstract decision-makers such as generator firms, utilities, and independent system operators adopt optimization approaches to determine nominal economically-efficient operating points at a slow-time scale. At the bottom dynamical-control layer, physical dynamical systems such as power plants are regulated to achieve real-time supply-demand balance while maintaining the system around the nominal operating points. With the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources, this hierarchical structure induces large economic inefficiency due to the fast and large fluctuations of the renewable generations. In this talk, I will present our work on distributed economically-efficient control, which improves the economic efficiency of the fast-time scale dynamical control. In the proposed control, the optimization computation is implicitly carried out by the physical dynamics of the control layer; in other words, the dynamics and control actions of physical plants are explicitly incorporated into the optimization algorithms. The resulting dynamical-control will automatically track the system efficient points regardless of uncertain system disturbances. I will also introduce a framework, reverse-forward engineering, which guides us the design of distributed economically-efficient control. Lastly, I will extend this framework to general network systems.

Host: Misha Chertkov