Urban areas, where more than 80% of US population lives and 80% of energy is consumed, are developing into smart, connected communities. At the heart of city infrastructures is the urban power distribution network, which supports various systems including government, safety, water, food, transportation, communication, and other functions vital to the lives and work of citizens. Current urban distribution networks were not designed for smart cities, and cannot sustain the ever-increasing demands from urban growth in the face of substantial increases in renewable generation and extreme weather-induced blackouts. Lack of a scalable and high-speed communication and computing infrastructure is a key bottleneck. This project will architect a novel Software-Defined Distribution Network (SD2N), a gigabit networking and computing platform to enable a sustainable and resilient electric power Internet for smart cities. SD2N will manage a vast number of smart grid devices, allow self-adaption, self-management and self-healing without costly hardware upgrades, and provide a sustainable, scalable and replicable smart city backbone infrastructure. The new architecture will illustrate how software-defined networking and distributed real-time computing can provide urban infrastructures with resilient, sustainable, human-centered, highly efficient and affordable service platforms for smart cities. The concepts and platform will have the potential to be applied across industry sectors, with significant benefits to municipalities, utilities, developers, and their stakeholders. The proposed SD2N platform will be demonstrated at US Ignite Summits, and the research results will be transferred to key stakeholders, communities and cities in collaboration with Eversource Energy and the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology.
The innovation of the project lies in integrating Internet of Things technologies, software-defined networking and real-time computing to establish a scalable SD2N architecture. It will combine a hybrid software-defined networking infrastructure and a distributed real-time computing framework with advanced optimization to enable self-configuration, scalable monitoring, real-time data streaming, processing, storage and feedback while tackling the stringent data availability and multi-latency requirements in managing urban distribution networks. The proposed SD2N architecture will enable coordinated economic dispatch of microgrids to significantly reduce their carbon footprints and total operation costs while supporting smooth, grid-friendly renewable energy penetration. It will also enable shared electricity services among connected communities, leading to resilient energy service for smart cities. An SD2N prototype, to be established in the University of Connecticut's innovative hardware-in-the-loop real-time test bed, will offer valuable resources for research communities, as well as the energy and IT industries.
