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EE Faculty Team Investigates Smart Grid Stability

September 1, 2015

TeamPhotoA new NSF grant supports a team of EE faculty who are undertaking a novel approach to creating a more stable smart grid.

Leading the research effort is EE ProfessorLinda Bushnell, who will be working together with EE Professor Daniel Kirschen, UW EE alum Andrew Clark (Ph.D. 2015), now an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and EE Professor and Chair Radha Poovendran.

With planning underway to transition electrical grids to smart grids, it is crucial that smart grids are able to perform optimally even when faced with disturbances or adversarial network attacks. To address this challenge, EE faculty will be developing algorithms using an approach called submodularity, which has provable optimality bounds and is scalable. While submodularity has been widely used in machine learning, it has not yet been applied to other systems such as smart grids.

This research is one of several new projects undertaken by EE faculty to address pressing power and energy system challenges: