Energy infrastructure is a critical underpinning of modern society that any compromise or sabotage of its secure and reliable operation will have a prominent impact on people's daily lives and the national economy. This project develops a hardware-in-the-loop reconfigurable system with embedded intelligence and resilient coordination schemes that would tackle the vulnerabilities of the power grid. This system differentiates itself from previous and existing research efforts in the following key aspects. First, it capitalizes and integrates new power electronic technologies in the system design to facilitate a more direct reconfiguration of the physical makeup of the grid. Second, it pushes the intelligence toward the lower level of the power grid such that local devices have the capability to make decisions and to react more quickly to contingencies. Third, it adopts control-theoretic real-time adaptation strategies for analytic assurance on providing desired dynamic responses to unpredictable system changes to efficiently maintain the availability of large distributed systems. Finally, the system is evaluated not only through simulation, it is also implemented and demonstrated on a microgrid testbed. The evaluation is conducted from three aspects, including real-time responsibility, fault resiliency, local collaboration capability. The power grid is a typical example of complex networks of highly interacting subsystems. Solving these fundamental problems to create a resilient power grid has a direct and immediate impact on this and other critical infrastructure. The project is coupled with a strong educational component including an innovative multi-university curriculum design, active recruitment of students from underrepresented groups supported by existing programs, and broad dissemination of research findings.
