Modeling, Simulation And Optimization for the 21st Century Electric Power Grid Conference

The electric power grid system is central to all critical infrastructures, including transportation, oil and natural gas, water supply, and communications. Events such as the 2003 blackout in the northeastern U.S. simultaneously disrupted ground and air traffic, cell phone and internet communication, food and water service, industry, and banking. The world economy's growing dependence on electricity for power, computerized transactions, and other services will make future disruptions even more costly.

The power grid system faces an evolving set of challenges as it grows in complexity through large-scale adoption of variable and uncertain renewable energy resources, smart grid technology, and energy storage options. At the same time, evolving power market structures and regulations and new environmental policies will affect our future resource mix. These changes will require the optimization of the power system from widely dispersed generation facilities to urban load centers; lead to two-way power flows at the distribution level; and generate vast amounts of information and data that must be aggregated, verified, organized, accessed, analyzed, and secured. These changes represent challenges to grid security, reliability, resiliency, economics, and efficiency.

Modeling, simulation, and optimization have been important tools for grid management, planning, and recovery. There has been growing recognition, however, that current efforts must be greatly expanded to meet the evolving needs of the power grids and that the new methods that are needed will pose significant mathematical and computational challenges.

This Engineering Conferences International (ECI) conference, which will include invited and solicited oral and poster presentations, will provide a forum for the broad power grid community to share their latest methodological approaches, findings, and insights.

Session topics will include:

Evolution of the modern electric power grid

Projections for demand patterns, variable generation, energy storage, and demand response.

New planning and operations paradigms to reduce the margin required to maintain a secure, stable system.

New approaches that make efficient and optimal use of the existing infrastructure and minimize capital investments.

Modeling, simulation, and optimization needs

System operational prognostics and decision support.

Faster-than-real-time dynamic analysis using state estimation.

Dynamic model creation, verification and validation.

Grid operations and planning

Stability analysis for planning and operations.

Ultra-fast state estimation for use in real-time applications.

Local energy networks, including smart devices and local-area components.

Planning methods that support the emerging modern grid (e.g., stochastic planning methods).

Wide-area controls for grid operations with demand-side management, energy storage, and variable generation.

Integration, optimization, and control of demand response.

Advanced unit commitment (e.g., mixed-integer and stochastic security-constrained unit commitment).

Analysis of retail and wholesale markets with emerging resources.

Characterization of consumer behavior for demand response applications.

Cross-domain modeling and simulation for transmission and distribution.

Transmission disruptions

Sufficiency assessment of primary and secondary frequency response and balancing reserves.

Infrastructure assurance.

System stability analysis for real-time decision support.

Extreme-event modeling and analysis.

N-k contingency evaluation.

Recovery analysis.

Computational science

Data management, verification and validation.

Modeling approaches.

Optimization algorithms.

Numerical methods, including those for continuous and discrete variables.

Visualization.

Scaling to high-performance computing platforms

Conference Organization

Conference Chairs

Mark C. Petri

Argonne National Laboratory

Paul Myrda

Electric Power Research Institute

International Organizing Committee

Guenter Conzelmann, Argonne National Laboratory

Joseph H. Eto, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Steven Fernandez, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Brian Gaucher, IBM Research

Ross Guttromson, Sandia National Laboratory

Marco Janssen, UTInnovation

Michael Papka, Argonne National Laboratory

Jianhui Wang, Argonne National Laboratory

Provided by Engineering Conferences International