Towards a smart power grid

Supervisor:

Talk:

Report due:

Abstract:

The availability of new technologies to produce, store, monitor, and distribute energy makes a fundamental re-engineering of the existing power grid both a desirable and feasible goal. As summarized by Steve Silberman in 2001, ``every node in the power network of the future will be awake, responsive, adaptive, price-smart, eco-sensitive, real-time, flexible, humming -- and interconnected with everything else.'' These nodes will collectively constitute a new way of ``managing'' energy: a large and highly dynamic distributed energy supply system -- the ``smart grid''.

In the context of this talk, we will outline the main challenges for computer science related to the design and the implementation of such a smart power network and focus on specific technical solutions. In particular, we will outline how the smart grid can be modeled and implemented as a multi-agent system.

Recommended bibliography:

• Directorate-General for Research Sustainable Energy Systems
  European SmartGrids Technology Platform - Vision and Strategy for Europe’s Electricity Networks of the Future.
  EUR 22040, 2006


• S. Massoud Amin and Bruce F. Wollenberg
  Toward a Smart Grid: Power Delivery for the 21st Century.
  IEEE Power & Energy Magazine, Vol. 3, No 5, pp. 34-41, September/October 2005


• M. Pipattanasomporn, H. Feroze, and S. Rahman
  Multi-Agent Systems in a Distributed Smart Grid: Design and Implementation.
  Proceedings of the IEEE Power Systems Conference and Exposition (PSCE 2009), Seattle, WA USA, March 2009

Further resources:

• European Technology Platform for the Electricity Networks of the Future


• Steve Silberman.
  The energy web.
  Wired, 9.07, 2001


• Michael Wooldridge and Nicholas R.Jennings
  Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice.
  Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 10, No 3, 1995