CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Distributed Asynchronous Algorithms and Software Systems for Wide-Area Monitoring of Power Systems

• funded by: NSF (award abstract)
• funding level: $400,000
• duration: 10/01/2013 - 09/30/2016 (no-cost extension until 09/30/2018)
• PIs (total funding: $1M):
  • Aranya Chakrabortty (PI) - North Carolina State University
  • Frank Mueller - North Carolina State University
  • Rakesh B Bobba - UIUC
  • Nitin H Vaidya - UIUC
  • Yufeng Xin - UNC Chapel Hill / RENCI

The objective of this NSF-CPS Synergy proposal is to develop a distributed algorithmic framework, supported by a highly fault-tolerant software system, for executing critical transmission-level operations of the North American power grid using gigantic volumes of Synchrophasor data.

Our primary task, therefore, will be to develop parallel computational methods for solving real-time wide-area monitoring and control problems with analytical investigation of their stability, convergence and robustness properties, followed by their implementation and testing against extraneous malicious attacks using our WAMS-RTDS testbed at NC State. In particular, we will address three critical research problems, namely (1) wide-area oscillation detection, (2) Synchrophasor-based transient stability assessment, and (3) voltage stability monitoring.

• A Real-time Distributed Storage System for Multi-Resolution Virtual Synchrophasor by Tao Qian, Aranya Chakrabortty, Frank Mueller, Yufeng Xin in IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, Jul 2014.
• A Real-Time Distributed Hash Table by T. Qian, Frank Mueller in Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTAS), Aug 2014, pages 1-10.
• Hybrid EDF Packet Scheduling for Real-Time Distributed Systems by T. Qian, Frank Mueller in Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), Jul 2015, pages 37-46.
• A Resilient Software Infrastructure for Wide-Area Measurement Systems by Tao Qian, Hang Xu, Aranya Chakrabortty, Frank Mueller, Yufeng Xin in IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, Jul 2016.
• A Linux Real-Time Packet Scheduler for Reliable Static SDN Routing by T. Qian, Frank Mueller in Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), Jul 2017, accepted.
• "A Failure Recovery Protocol for Software-Defined Real-Time Networks" by Tao Qian, Frank Mueller in Conference on Compiler, Architecture and Synthesis on Embedded Systems (CASES'18), Oct 2018, published in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD), DOI 10.1109/TCAD.2018.2857299.

• "End-to-end Predictability for Distributed Real-Time Systems" by T. Qian, Ph.D. Thesis, North Carolina State University, May 2017 (last known position: VMWare, CA)

• NSF news on Smarter smart grids

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