The convergence of competition in the power industry with the arrival of environmentally friendly micro-turbines, fuel cells, photovoltaics, small wind turbines, and other advanced distributed power technologies has sparked strong interest in distributed power generation. This convergence of policy and technology promises to transform the electric power system from one relying primarily on central generation to one in which Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) provide most of the power needed. The resulting major improvement in power reliability, quality and efficiency; and the greater flexibility to respond to changing energy needs could save billions of dollars now lost each year because of power disruptions. An important challenge with this evolution -- especially in light of the increasing number and diversity of DERs -- is the development of integrated monitoring, control and coordination strategies that would ensure optimal dispatch of the energy resources to provide highly reliable services under various disturbance and failure scenarios. This is significant given the fact that the distributed power market is driven by the need for reliable high-quality power, and the substantial impact that local disruptions in power flow can have when the DERs are integrated to support grid operations.
The objective of this research project is to resolve the fundamental issues that arise in the fault-tolerant dispatch of DERs through the development of a hierarchical architecture for the integration of monitoring and supervisory fault-tolerant control. In this architecture, distributed monitoring and fault-tolerant control systems that perform timely fault identification and control system reconfiguration at the local level are integrated with a higher-level supervisor that optimally coordinates power generation in the event that local fault rectification is not possible. This hierarchy enables the timely mitigation of faults with supervisory oversight. To achieve these objectives, the following projects are planned: (1) the development of an integrated approach for local model-based fault identification and accommodation in stand-alone DERs, (2) the design of robust monitoring and reconfiguration strategies that account for intrinsic uncertainties due to intermittent power generation in renewable DERs, external disturbances, and data losses and errors, (3) the design of an optimization-based supervisory control system that reconfigures the power dispatch strategy following failure events, and (4) applications of the developed methods to simulated models of hybrid DERs.
