Seminar Announcement
Situational Intelligence for
Utility Power System and
Micro-Grid Operations
Prof. Kumar Venayagamoorthy
April 26th 2016, 10.30am, Room 160/3
Faculty of Engineering - Università Politecnica delle Marche
Via Brecce Bianche 60131 Ancona
Abstract
The modernization of the electric power grid can be viewed as a digital upgrade of the existing electricity infrastructure with the vision to lower the cost of energy delivered with improved reliability, resilience, efficiency and sustainability. There exist numerous challenges, known and unknown, to realizing this vision. Real-time sensing and monitoring is the gateway to evolve intelligent grid operations. A vast amount of spatial and temporal data has to be processed, so that the pertinent information is communicated to the appropriate near real time-planning and control centers in a timely manner for necessary decisions to be made and adaptations to take place. ‘Big Data’ initiative worldwide has provided a unique window of opportunity for improving the analytical methods in smart grid operations. Creating information and knowledge from cause-effect understanding and dynamic models is an emerging technology to provide situational awareness and intelligence in control centers. New real-time (and faster than real-time) data analytics is a promising development that will enhance future energy management system solutions. The monitoring, optimization and control systems for utility power systems and micro-grids will require real-time situational intelligence enabled by computational systems thinking machines (CSTMs) to handle the ‘Big Data’, increased variability and uncertainties caused by high-levels of penetration of variable renewable energy resources. What principles will govern the design of such systems and where do we find them? Such CSTMs will require three basic capabilities: sense-making, decision-making and adaptation. Realization of those capabilities will depend in turn on subsystems that continuously improve their knowledge on the dynamics of the electric power grid and not just gather data/information. This talk will provide insight into the research, development and innovation of real-time situational intelligence for enabling improved power system and micro-grid operations.
G. Kumar Venayagamoorthy (S’91-M’97-SM’02) is the Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Automotive Engineering at Clemson University. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), Rolla, USA from 2002 to 2011. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is the Founder (2004) and Director of the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (http://rtpis.org). He holds an Honorary Professor position in the School of Engineering at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Dr. Venayagamoorthy’s interests are in the research, development and innovation of advanced computational methods for smart grid operations, including intelligent sensing and monitoring, power system optimization, stability and control, and signal processing. He has published ~ 500 refereed technical articles. His publications are cited over 10,000 times with a h-index of 51. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has been involved in over 65 sponsored projects in excess of $10 million. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is involved in the leadership and organization of many conferences including the General Chair of the Annual Power System Conference (Clemson, SC, USA) since 2013, and Pioneer and Chair/co-Chair of the IEEE Symposium of Computational Intelligence Applications in Smart Grid (CIASG) since 2011. He is currently the Chair of the IEEE PES Working Group on Intelligent Control Systems, and the Founder and Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on Smart Grid. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the IET, UK, and the SAIEE.