DR. LAMINE MILI IEEE Life Fellow, Virginia Tech

Tuesday, February 2 • 11:00 AM – Noon (PT)

Overview

In this talk, I will define the concepts of robustness, reliability, resilience, and sustainability of power systems. The robustness of a system to a given class of perturbations is defined as the ability of this system to maintain its function when it is subject to a set of perturbations of this class, which may induce changes in its structure. It is enhanced by hardening the system via additional structural redundancy and via preventive actions taken by hierarchical centralized controllers that are designed under spatial- and time-scale decomposition principles. On the other hand, the resilience of a system to a class of unexpected extreme perturbations is defined as the ability of this system to (i) gracefully degrade its function by altering its structure in an agile way when it is subject to a set of perturbations of this class and (ii) quickly recover it once the perturbations have ceased. Resilience is enhanced via structural system segmentation into weakly coupled subsystems and via distributed and coordinated corrective control actions taken by multi-agents that supervise a host of microgrids. It is also enhanced
by active load management system. I will show how in the planning phase, a trade-off between robustness and resilience can be achieved by means of a risk-based optimization problem subject to a bound in the cost of additional resources that the infrastructures ought to be provided with.

Bio

Dr. Mili is a Professor and Program Director of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the Northern Virginia Center of Virginia Tech. He has five years of industrial experience with the Tunisian electric utility, STEG. At STEG, he worked in the planning department from 1976 to 1979 and then at the Test and Meter Laboratory from 1979 to 1981. He was a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Grenoble Institute of Technology and the École Supérieure d’Électricité in in France, the École Polytechnique de Tunisie, in Tunisia, and did consulting work for Hydro-Quebec and the French Power Transmission
company, RTE. His research has focused on robust statistics, robust signal processing, robust estimation and control, smart grids, resiliency and sustainability of critical infrastructures, risk management of complex systems to catastrophic failures, non-linear dynamics, and bifurcation theory.