Biblio

Emerging industrial platforms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet (II) in the US and Industrie 4.0 in Europe have tremendously accelerated the development of new generations of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that integrate humans and human organizations (H-CPS) with physical and computation processes and extend to societal-scale systems such as traffic networks, electric grids, or networks of autonomous systems where control is dynamically shifted between humans and machines. Although such societal-scale CPS can potentially affect many aspect of our lives, significant societal strains have emerged about the new technology trends and their impact on how we live. Emerging tensions extend to regulations, certification, insurance, and other societal constructs that are necessary for the widespread adoption of new technologies. If these systems evolve independently in different parts of the world, they will ‘hard-wire’ the social context in which they are created, making interoperation hard or impossible, decreasing reusability, and narrowing markets for products and services. While impacts of new technology trends on social policies have received attention, the other side of the coin – to make systems adaptable to social policies – is nearly absent from engineering and computer science design practice. This paper focuses on technologies that can be adapted to varying public policies and presents (1) hard problems and technical challenges and (2) some recent research approaches and opportunities. The central goal of this paper is to discuss the challenges and opportunities for constructing H-CPS that can be parameterized by social context. The focus in on three major application domains: connected vehicles, transactive energy systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles.Abbreviations: CPS: Cyber-physical systems; H-CPS: Human-cyber-physical systems; CV: Connected vehicle; II: Industrial Internet; IoT: Internet of Things

As more non-synchronous renewable energy sources (RES) participate in power systems, the system's inertia decreases and becomes time dependent, challenging the ability of existing control schemes to maintain frequency stability. System operators, research laboratories, and academic institutes have expressed the importance to adapt to this new power system paradigm. As one of the potential solutions, virtual inertia has become an active research area. However, power dynamics have been modeled as time-invariant, by not modeling the variability in the system's inertia. To address this, we propose a new modeling framework for power system dynamics to simulate a time-varying evolution of rotational inertia coefficients in a network. We model power dynamics as a hybrid system with discrete modes representing different rotational inertia regimes of the network. We test the performance of two classical controllers from the literature in this new hybrid modeling framework: optimal closed-loop Model Predictive Control (MPC) and virtual inertia placement. Results show that the optimal closed-loop MPC controller (Linear MPC) performs the best in terms of cost; it is 82 percent less expensive than virtual inertia placement. It is also more efficient in terms of energy injected/absorbed to control frequency. To address the lower performance of virtual inertia placement, we then propose a new Dynamic Inertia Placement scheme and we find that it is more efficient in terms of cost (74 percent cheaper) and energy usage, compared to classical inertia placement schemes from the literature.

With the increasing penetration of non-synchronous variable renewable energy sources (RES) in power grids, the system's inertia decreases and varies over time, affecting the capability of current control schemes to handle frequency regulation. Providing virtual inertia to power systems has become an interesting topic of research, since it may provide a reasonable solution to address this new issue. However, power dynamics are usually modeled as time-invariant, without including the effect of varying inertia due to the presence of RES. This paper presents a framework to design a fixed learned controller based on datasets of optimal time-varying LQR controllers. In our scheme, we model power dynamics as a hybrid system with discrete modes representing different rotational inertia regimes of the grid. We test the performance of our controller in a twelve-bus system using different fixed inertia modes. We also study our learned controller as the inertia changes over time. By adding virtual inertia we can guarantee stability of high-renewable (low-inertia) modes. The novelty of our work is to propose a design framework for a stable controller with fixed gains for time-varying power dynamics. This is relevant because it would be simpler to implement a proportional controller with fixed gains compared to a time-varying control.

Inertia from rotating masses of generators in power systems influence the instantaneous frequency change when an imbalance between electrical and mechanical power occurs. Renewable energy sources (RES), such as solar and wind power, are connected to the grid via electronic converters. RES connected through converters affect the system's inertia by decreasing it and making it time-varying. This new setting challenges the ability of current control schemes to maintain frequency stability. Proposing adequate controllers for this new paradigm is key for the performance and stability of future power grids. The contribution of this paper is a framework to learn sparse time-invariant frequency controllers in a power system network with a time-varying evolution of rotational inertia. We model power dynamics using a Switched-Affine hybrid system to consider different modes corresponding to different inertia coefficients. We design a controller that uses as features, i.e. input, the systems states. In other words, we design a control proportional to the angles and frequencies. We include virtual inertia in the controllers to ensure stability. One of our findings is that it is possible to restrict communication between the nodes by reducing the number of features in the controller (from 22 to 10 in our case study) without disrupting performance and stability. Furthermore, once communication between nodes has reached a threshold, increasing it beyond this threshold does not improve performance or stability. We find a correlation between optimal feature selection in sparse controllers and the topology of the network.

Stormwater infrastructure is required to safely manage uncertain precipitation events of varying intensity, while protecting natural ecosystems, under restricted financial budgets. In practice, candidate designs for stormwater detention or retention systems are commonly evaluated assuming that a given system operates independently from nearby systems and is initially empty prior to an extreme storm event. In recent work, we demonstrate the use of a control-theoretic method, called reachability analysis, to provide a more realistic design-phase indicator of system performance [1]. In particular, reachability analysis predicts the response of a dynamically-coupled stormwater storage network to a deterministic storm event under a wide range of initial conditions simultaneously [1]. The outcomes of this analysis can be viewed as measures of system robustness that inform the evaluation of safety-critical design choices [1]. Here we discuss how to extend the recent work to incorporate the stochastic nature of surface runoff. We represent surface runoff as a random disturbance to a dynamic system model of a stormwater storage network. Using a probability distribution of surface runoff derived from a Monte Carlo method, we apply an existing algorithm [2] for stochastic reachability analysis to the problem of designing robust stormwater storage systems. We discuss particular advantages and disadvantages of using stochastic reachability analysis, deterministic reachability analysis, or random sampling to assess system robustness.

Emerging industrial platforms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet (II) in the US and Industrie 4.0 in Europe have tremendously accelerated the development of new generations of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) that integrate humans and human organizations (H-CPS) with physical and computation processes and extend to societal-scale systems such as traffic networks, electric grids, or networks of autonomous systems where control is dynamically shifted between humans and machines. Although such societal-scale CPS can potentially affect many aspect of our lives, significant societal strains have emerged about the new technology trends and their impact on how we live. Emerging tensions extend to regulations, certification, insurance, and other societal constructs that are necessary for the widespread adoption of new technologies. If these systems evolve independently in different parts of the world, they will ‘hard-wire’ the social context in which they are created, making interoperation hard or impossible, decreasing reusability, and narrowing markets for products and services. While impacts of new technology trends on social policies have received attention, the other side of the coin – to make systems adaptable to social policies – is nearly absent from engineering and computer science design practice. This paper focuses on technologies that can be adapted to varying public policies and presents (1) hard problems and technical challenges and (2) some recent research approaches and opportunities. The central goal of this paper is to discuss the challenges and opportunities for constructing H-CPS that can be parameterized by social context. The focus in on three major application domains: connected vehicles, transactive energy systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles.Abbreviations: CPS: Cyber-physical systems; H-CPS: Human-cyber-physical systems; CV: Connected vehicle; II: Industrial Internet; IoT: Internet of Things