Department Seminar Series

Formal Abstractions for Safe Integration of Responsive Loads in Smart Grids

15th September 2022, 13:00 add to calenderAshton Lecture Theatre
Dr. Sadegh Soudjani
School of Computing, Newcastle University

Abstract

In this talk I will present two examples of using formal methods for modelling and design of smart grids to integrate the responsive loads including Smart Buildings, Electric Vehicles, and Energy Storage Systems, while ensuring safe operation of the grid. Due to their flexibility in providing services to occupants, Smart Buildings can potentially be engaged in power system services, such as load shifting and demand-response programs. The requirement in utilising such flexibility is the construction of models that accurately capture the time evolution of physical variables based on data gathered from the building. The continuous nature of physical variables, the discrete nature of digital controllers, and the presence of uncertainty originating from the environment and from the users’ behaviour, make the general framework of Stochastic Hybrid Systems (SHS) well-suited for modelling purpose.

In the first part of the talk I discuss analysis, verification, and controller synthesis of SHS models via formal abstractions. I present abstraction techniques that approximate the concrete SHS model with simpler abstract models, which are easier to analyse and to verify, and give a-priori guarantees on the approximation level. Properties of the abstract model (e.g. to guarantee user comfort in a Smart Building) that are expressed in certain logic can be verified via model checkers. Then I show how to employ the newly developed abstraction techniques to provide an aggregate model and to synthesise controllers for collection of Smart Buildings. The broadcast control scheme utilises the formal modelling approach to estimate the aggregate state based on conditional Kalman filter, which is then used to regulate the aggregate power consumption of the collection of buildings in a receding horizon fashion. As such, the control architecture does not require knowledge of the individual states of the buildings, but directly leverages the measurement of the total power consumption.

In the second part of the talk, I discuss how formal methods can be used for integrating a population of plug-in electric vehicles for frequency regulation of smart grids. I present the design of a novel symbolic controller to enhance the frequency response under a large outage event. The symbolic controller guarantees the frequency returns to a specified safe interval while satisfying other requirements utilising the flexibility of electric vehicles.
add to calender (including abstract)

Biography

Sadegh Soudjani is a Reader in the School of Computing at Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in 2006, the BSc degree in Mathematics in 2007, and the M.Sc. degree in control engineering in 2009 all from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. He received the Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control in November 2014 from the Delft Center for Systems and Control at the Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands. Before joining Newcastle University, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, United Kingdom, and at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Germany. He is the recipient of the DISC Best PhD Thesis Award in 2015, QEST Best Paper Award in 2018, Newcastle Teaching Award in 2020, New Investigator Award from the UK EPSRC Research Council in 2021, and the €4m EIC Pathfinder Challenge Award for the project “SymAware” in 2022.
His research interests are formal model-based and data-driven synthesis, abstraction, and verification of complex dynamical systems with application in Cyber-Physical Systems, particularly involving smart grids and energy networks.

Additional Materials