ABSTRACT

With the advent of remarkable development of solar power panel and inverter technology as well as long-term interest in getting rid of polluting energy, countries are trying to migrate from conventional energy sources (carbon based energy sources) to nonconventional energy sources (e.g., solar, wind, and geothermal). It gave rise of a new paradigm called Transactive Energy (TE) [3] that utilizes economic and control techniques to effectively manage Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Another goal of TE is to improve grid reliability and efficiency. However, to evaluate various TE approaches, a comprehensive simulation tool is needed that is easy to use and capable of simulating the power-grid along with various grid operational scenarios that occur in the transactive energy paradigm. In this research, we present a web-based design and simulation platform (called a design studio) targeted toward evaluation of power-grid distribution system and transactive energy approaches [1]. This design studio is a step towards creating a platform to edit and visualize existing power-grid models graphically, create new power-grid network models, simulate those networks, and inject various scenario-specific perturbations to evaluate specific configurations of transactive energy simulations. The design studio provides (i) a novel Domain-Specific Modeling Language (DSML) using the Web-based Generic Modeling Environment (WebGME [4]) for the graphical modeling of power-grid, cyber-physical attacks, and TE scenarios, and (ii) a reusable cloud-hosted simulation backend using the Gridlab-D power-grid distribution system simulation tool [2].

BIO

Dr. Himanshu Neema is a Research Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. Dr. Neema researches in the general area of model-based design and modeling and simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems and their integrated simulation with hardware- and humans- in the loop. His research interests include: Modeling & Simulation, Model-Integrated Computing, Distributed Simulations, Artificial Intelligence, Constraint Programming, Planning & Scheduling, Smart-Grids, Transactive Energy, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), Semantic Web, and Automated Document Analysis & Classification. Dr. Neema has 20 years of experience in research and development of software applications covering above areas and has co-authored ~40 publications.