Gowtham Kandaperumal – Doctoral Final Exam
About the event
Student: Gowtham Kanadperumal
Degree: Electrical & Computer Engineering Ph.D.
Advisor: Dr. Anurag Srivastava
Dissertation Title: Resilience-Driven Situational Awareness and Decision Support for Cyber-Power Distribution Systems
Abstract: Distribution grid planners, engineers, and operators are increasingly observing resiliency as the primary design attribute for modern distribution systems to mitigate the impact of increasing extreme weather and cyber events threatening their system. Enabling distribution system resiliency is a multi-step process that begins with the identification of the potential threats to the system, the quantification of the current resiliency of the system to the identified threats through the development of resiliency metrics, proposing resiliency improvements and finally, the evaluation of the resiliency improvement strategy. This process of enabling resiliency requires system-specific research and complex analysis tools beginning with sophisticated physical and cyber system models, resiliency metrics for quantification, planning methods to upgrade resiliency performance, operational strategies to mitigate the loss of resiliency, and controls of interdependent systems.
This dissertation adds to the recent works on resiliency metrics, decision support for resiliency improvements, and presents novel strategies for increasing resiliency for microgrid/distribution grid systems. A multi-dimensional resiliency metric called the anticipate – withstand – recover (AWR) metric is used to evaluate the power distribution system’s resiliency to physical and cyber threats. The work studies various planning and operational use cases for better situational awareness and resilient operation of distribution and microgrids. A set of prototypical communication network models is developed to address the lack of standard communication network models for the co-simulation of smart grid application. The algorithms developed in this work increase resiliency of the distribution grid/microgrid using targeted investments in resiliency enabling infrastructure, defense against cyber-attacks, black start restoration, and delay tolerance of communication sensitive microgrid applications.