The objective of this research is to understand how pervasive information changes energy production, distribution and use. The design of a more scalable and flexible electric infrastructure, encouraging efficient use, integrating local generation, and managing demand through awareness of energy availability and use over time, is investigated. The approach is to develop a cyber overlay on the energy distribution system in its physical manifestations: machine rooms, buildings, neighborhoods, isolated generation islands and regional grids.
The goal of this research is to identify ways to inexpensively provide detailed information about energy consumption in buildings and facilitate conservation. By relying on aggregate data, homeowners and facility managers are blind to the contribution of individual appliances and activities to the overall numbers. And while there is adequate evidence that providing real-time, appliance-specific data allows users to achieve significant energy savings, the available solutions in the market are either inadequately granular or prohibitively expensive.
Augmenting dedicated control systems with real-time sensor and actuator networks poses a number of new challenges in control system design that cannot be addressed with traditional process control methods, including: a) the handling of additional, potentially asynchronous and/or delayed measurements in the overall networked control system, and b) the substantial increase in the number of process state variables, manipulated inputs, and measurements which may impede the ability of centralized control systems to carry out real-time calculations within th
