Title: Distributed Control of Electricity Distribution Networks in the face of DER disruptions
Speaker: Devendra Shelar, MIT
Time and Date: 3:00 pm, June 10 2015
Venue: Room 211, Mechanical Engineering
Abstract: The talk is based on joint work with Saurabh Amin. We focus on the question of decentralized control of radial electricity distribution networks in the wake of security attacks to Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). We model the problem as a network-interdiction problem on an electricity network with tree-topology . We setup the attacker-defender interaction as a two-stage bilevel optimization problem. In the first stage, the attacker (leader) disconnects a subset of DERs by sending them wrong set-point signals. The distribution utility (follower) response includes Volt VAR control of non-compromised DERs and load control. The objective of the attacker (resp. defender) is to maximize (resp. minimize) the weighted sum of the cost due to loss of frequency regulation and the cost due to loss of voltage regulation. We discuss the trade-off between maintaining voltage versus achieving frequency regulation. In the second stage, we use the optimal defender response generated from the first-stage to design a decentralized control strategy for each local controller that governs a cluster of DERs and loads. Our control strategy provides voltage and frequency regulation under a broad range of DER failure scenarios. That is, if a subset of DERs is suddenly disconnected, the local controllers automatically respond based on their respective observations of
local fluctuations in voltage and frequency. We illustrate the effectiveness of this control strategy on benchmark networks.
Speaker Bio: Devendra Shelar finished his Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science and Engineering in 2012 from IIT Bombay. He is currently a Graduate Student working towards a Masters in Transportation
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will be continuing at MIT as a PhD student in Computational Science and Engineering. His research interests broadly include Optimization and control, and Network
Security.