Intelligent Energy Systems: Introducing Power-ICT Interdependency in Modeling and Control Design

This paper introduces a novel control scheme for mitigating the cascading effects of a failure in the power transmission grid. Modern power systems include controller entities, which exchange information (measurement/control signals) with the grid through information communication technology (ICT). Nevertheless, networking problems can generate observability/reachability issues, which prevent the controller from correctly estimating the grid's state and applying in a timely manner the necessary actions. Thus, we present a control approach that explicitly takes into account the potential degradation of the ICT performance during power failure events. To this end, the power-induced ICT deficiencies are modeled as additive communication latency, to quantify their impact on the controller's effectiveness. Moreover, in order to overcome excessive/varying delays, a model predictive control architecture is proposed, which produces directives for both the safeguard cut of power lines and the load/generation regulation, in a manner that minimizes the impact of the initial power failure on the overall grid.