Abstract

The power grid has evolved from a physical system to a cyber-physical system that consists of digital devices that perform measurement, control, communication, computation, and actuation. With increased penetration in distributed energy resources (DER) that include renewable generation, flexible loads, and storage, these devices can be as large as 8 billion in number just in the US grid, many of whom are capable of monitoring and making crucial decisions. While these devices provide extraordinary opportunities for improvements in efficiency and sustainability, they also introduce new vulnerabilities in the form of cyberattacks. This brings up the following question: How can we ensure grid resilience in the face of escalating cyber threats while accommodating the intermittent and distributed nature of DERs?

In this talk, we’ll dive into this important question, and explore a framework that enables distributed decision-making and control. This framework is built around a local electricity market with a hierarchical structure that accommodates the distributed ownership of DERs, both in location and time as well as physical constraints due to power physics. This talk will explore the relation between market mechanisms, distributed optimization, and resilience for the grid. A variety of attack surfaces including those that compromise large IoT (internet-of-things) networks will be considered. The use of distributed visibility and the related situational awareness to the operators will be examined through simulation studies of a distribution grid with 100,000 nodes. The role of distributed decision-making principles of optimization and control in prevention, resilience, and detection & isolation will be examined.

Bio

Anu Annaswamy is the Founder and Director of the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. She previously held faculty positions at Yale, Boston University, and is currently a Senior Research Scientist at MIT. Her research interests span adaptive control theory and its applications to aerospace, automotive, propulsion, and energy systems as well as cyber-physical systems such as Smart Grids, Smart Cities, and Smart Infrastructures. She has received best paper awards (Axelby, 1986; CSM, 2010; IFAC Annual Reviews in Control, 2021-23), Distinguished Member and Distinguished Lecturer awards from the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS), and a Presidential Young Investigator award from NSF, 1991-97. She is a Fellow of IEEE and

the International Federation of Automatic Control and recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Indian Institute of Science for 2021.

Anu Annaswamy is the author of a graduate textbook on adaptive control, co-editor of two vision documents on smart grids and two editions of the Impact of Control Technology report, and editor for a number of journals, including IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems, IEEE Access, the IFAC Annual Reviews in Control, and Asian Journal of Control. She served as the President of CSS in 2020. Currently, Dr. Annaswamy serves as President-elect of the American Automatic Control Council and a Faculty Lead in the Electric Power Systems workstream in the MIT Future Energy Systems Center, and she will begin an appointment as Editor in Chief of IEEE Control Systems magazine in January 2025. Dr. Annaswamy received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 1985. She has co-authored two National Academies consensus reports: The Future of Electric Power in the United States (2021) and The Role of Net Metering in the Evolving Electricity System (2023).