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Workshop on Cyberphysical Applications in Smart Power Systems

The fi rst North Carolina State University (NCSU) Strategic Re-search Initiative Workshop on

Cyberphysical Applications in Smart Power Systems was held on the Cen-tennial campus of NCSU, Raleigh, on February 18–19, 2011. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers from computing, com-munications, and control to explore research results and perspectives on how cyberphysical system theory can play a transformative role for next-generation smart power system operations. Twenty invited speakers, representing 16 U.S. universities and industrial organizations, presented their research in this workshop at-tended by about 60 registrants.

The gathering provided a forum for discussions on topics ranging from cybersecurity, distributed computing, and network control of transmission-level power systems, to smart metering and market pricing for residential-level energy management. The audi-ence consisted of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, as well as research personnel from indus-trial organizations such as ABB Cor-porate Research, Eaton Corporation, and Quanta Technologies. The event was organized by NCSU’s Aranya Chakrabortty, from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Depart-ment, and Frank Mueller, from the Computer Science Department.

The workshop program consisted of 15 technical talks on the first day, organized into three broad themes. Daniel Stancil, head of the NCSU

ECE Department, made opening remarks. The first talk was by Bruce McMillin from the Missouri Institute of Science and Technology. Bruce offered an overview of his research on information flow analysis of energy management in smart grids, emphasizing security and confiden-tiality in both cyber and physical domains of power networks. Frank

Mueller from NCSU discussed secu-rity in terms of three major players in a distribution-level power system: intrusion monitoring, communica-tion middleware, and distributed control. The discussion broadened into several interesting applications in the next two presentations, the first by Tariq Samad from Honey-well focusing on demand response and energy storage, and the sec-ond by Bruno Sinopoli from Carn-egie Mellon University on modeling large-scale data centers.

The final two talks of the morn-ing were given by Sean Meyn from the University of Illinois and Steven Low from Caltech. Sean explained how market pricing can be modeled by dynamic games between suppliers and consumers in a smart grid envi-ronment. Steven gave an overview of Caltech’s smart grid research initia-tives with a focus on optimal energy flow problems. All presentations were followed by interactive question and answer sessions.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2011.941290 Date of publication: 14 July 2011

Morning session on Friday.

Sean Meyn’s talk on power markets.

AUGUST 2011 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 101

The afternoon session was devoted to smart grid communications and cyber-security, starting with an over-view of the state-of-art by Sumit Roy from the University of Washington. Sumit’s talk highlighted the need for timely and reliable data transfer protocols, especially with the emer-gence of bidirectional communication through smart meters. Deepa Kun-dur from Texas A&M University pre-sented a graph-theoretic framework for risk analysis and performance evaluation of power systems under malicious attacks, while Manimaran Govindarasu from Iowa State Univer-sity demonstrated how attacks injected by smart hackers can be counteracted intelligently to ensure smooth opera-tion of critical applications. The final talk of the session by Rakesh Bobba from the Information Trust Institute at the University of Illinois condensed the discussion with an overview of networking challenges for real-time monitoring and control of large power systems.

The final session of the day focused on the broader picture of smart grid infrastructure, starting with two industrial talks, the first by Marina Thottan from Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs and the second by Sami Ayyorgun from Telcordia Technologies Inc. Both talks illuminated the need for reliable mathematical models for different lay-ers of the power grid that will enable evaluation of its stability and immu-nity in response to cyber and physical attacks. A discussion on using Markov chains for fault detection and cover-age in dynamical models of power systems was presented by N. Eva Wu from Binghamton University, followed by further use of statistical models for smart grid disturbance monitor-ing by George Michailidis from the University of Michigan. The final talk of the day was given by Subhash-ish Bhattacharya from NCSU on how cyberalgorithms can be physically implemented and verified in real-time digital simulators.

The second day of the workshop featured f ive mult idisciplinary

talks followed by a panel discussion. The day started with a presenta-tion by Dave Bertagnolli from ISO-New England on phasor measurement unit data analysis cover-ing notable disturbance events in the northeast-ern power system over the past ten years. Next, Mo-Yuen Chow of NCSU highlighted time critical-ity in real-time power system con-trols, while Michael Devetsikiotis, also of NCSU, offered several opti-mization-based scheduling prob-lems for smart grid communication networks. Laurel Varnado from the NC Solar Center spoke about smart grid policies and rate designs. Aranya Chakrabortty discussed identification and stability analysis of dynamic equivalent models of power systems using synchropha-sor technology. The panel discussion summarized these discussions, fol-lowed by questions and comments from the audience.

In summary, the workshop focused on applications of cyber-

physical systems in the context of electric smart grids. The event promoted collaboration between academia and industry and moti-vated students to explore emerging research problems in power sys-tems. The workshop highlighted how researchers from diverse back-grounds in electrical and computer engineering can coordinate their expertise in support of cyber-inte-grated energy infrastructure.

Fin ancial support for this event was provided by the NC State Strate-gic Research Initiative, the FREEDM Systems Center, and the NCSU ECE Department.

Steven Low’s talk on optimal energy flow.

Rakesh Bobba and Deepa Kundur.

Sumit Roy’s talk on grid communications.

The event promoted collaboration between academia

and industry and motivated students to explore

emerging research problems in power systems.