Advanced Control and Optimization for Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

Abstract

The power network undergoes a transition from a system with conventional generation power plants and inflexible loads to a system with a large numbers of distributed generations, renewable generations, energy storages, and flexible loads. This trend has imposed very significant challenges on the corresponding control design to achieve efficient operation and effective protection of the power grid. First of all, centralized control strategies may become intractable for large-scale power systems, and is subject to technical issues such as poor scalability and low reliability. To overcome these limitations, it is desirable to develop distributed control strategies. Second, in a power network with a high penetration of DERs such as wind generators and solar panels, there is high uncertainty of power generation. Thus, the uncertain and unpredictable features of DERs need to be taken into account to design a control strategy. In addition, the communication network in the distribution network is still under-deployed and has limited capabilities. Thus, the design of control strategies must taken communication imperfections, such as time-delays, packet-drop, and limited bandwidth, into consideration. Last but not the least, the geographical distribution of system components and the use of information and communication technologies have exposed the power network to new security risks because they are inherently vulnerable to cyber-physical attacks. Thus, it is important to design attack-resilient control strategy to achieve effective system protection against malicious threats.