CT-M: Collaborative Research: A Resilient Real-Time System for a Secure and Reconfigurable Power Grid

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. Past failures such as the massive northeastern power blackout in August 2003 and the recent Florida blackout in February 2008 have revealed serious defects in both system-level management and device-level designs. This project is aimed at a hardware-in-the-loop reconfigurable system with embedded intelligence and resilient coordination schemes to tackle the vulnerabilities of the power grid. The research in this project will investigate a number of critical issues related to this system, including the design of a hybrid system architecture, the development of advanced power electronic devices with embedded intelligence for reconfiguration of the power grid, the development of control- theoretic algorithms to guarantee real-time adaptation to system changes caused by various attacks, and the threats to existing state estimation algorithms and their defenses.

The proposed research can help secure the grid and prevent potential outages from happening. Instead of limiting the system to manage existing devices, the developed system is adaptive to the future power grid in years to come. 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 infrastructures.