A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

Digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision making. Recent advances in computational pipelines, multiphysics solvers, artificial intelligence, big data cybernetics, data processing and management tools bring the promise of digital twins and their impact on society closer to reality. Digital twinning is now an important and emerging trend in many applications. Also referred to as a computational megamodel, device shadow, mirrored system, avatar or a synchronized virtual prototype, there can be no doubt that a digital twin plays a transformative role not only in how we design and operate cyber-physical intelligent systems, but also in how we advance the modularity of multi-disciplinary systems to tackle fundamental barriers not addressed by the current, evolutionary modeling practices. In this work, we review the recent status of methodologies and techniques related to the construction of digital twins mostly from a modeling perspective. Our aim is to provide a detailed coverage of the current challenges and enabling technologies along with recommendations and reflections for various stakeholders.

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Digital Twin: Values, Challenges and Enablers From a Modeling Perspective

Electricity theft is harmful to power grids. Integrating information flows with energy flows, smart grids can help to solve the problem of electricity theft owning to the availability of massive data generated from smart grids. The data analysis on the data of smart grids is helpful in detecting electricity theft because of the abnormal electricity consumption pattern of energy thieves. However, the existing methods have poor detection accuracy of electricity theft since most of them were conducted on one-dimensional (1-D) electricity consumption data and failed to capture the periodicity of electricity consumption. In this paper, we originally propose a novel electricity-theft detection method based on wide and deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) model to address the above concerns. In particular, wide and deep CNN model consists of two components: the wide component and the deep CNN component. The deep CNN component can accurately identify the nonperiodicity of electricity theft and the periodicity of normal electricity usage based on 2-D electricity consumption data. Meanwhile, the wide component can capture the global features of 1-D electricity consumption data. As a result, wide and deep CNN model can achieve the excellent performance in electricity-theft detection. Extensive experiments based on realistic dataset show that wide and deep CNN model outperforms other existing methods.

Wide and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Electricity-Theft Detection to Secure Smart Grids

Energy crisis and carbon emission have become two seriously concerned issues universally. As a feasible solution, Energy Internet (EI) has aroused global concern once proposed. EI is a new power generation developing a vision of evolution of smart grids into the Internet. The communication infrastructure is an essential component to the implementation of EI. A scalable and permanent communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of EI. In this paper, we present an introduction and the motivation to the evolution from smart grid to EI. We also introduce a representative EI architecture, i.e., the future renewable electric energy delivery and management system. Four critical EI features are emphasized. Then, we summarize the essential requirements that EI systems have to meet. With several key supporting technologies, EI shall realize the optimal utilization of highly scalable and distributed green energy resources, so that the situation of severe energy source crisis and carbon emission can be efficiently relieved. Since an EI system might have extensively distributed consumers and devices, the guarantee of its reliability and security is extremely significant. The further specific exploration for challenges, including reliability and security, will be stated in this paper.

A Survey on Energy Internet: Architecture, Approach, and Emerging Technologies

Smart grids (SGs), which can be classified into a class of networked distributed control systems, are designed to deliver electricity from various plants through a communication network to serve individual consumers. Due to the complexity of environments, the distribution of the spatial locations and vulnerability of the communication networks, cyber security emerges to be a critical issue because millions of electronic devices are interconnected via communication networks throughout critical power facilities. This paper addresses a comprehensive security understanding of the SGs framework, attacks scenarios, detection/protection methods, estimation and control strategies from both communication and control viewpoints. Also, some potential challenges and solution approaches are discussed to deal with the threat issues of SGs. At last, some conclusions and highlight future research directions are presented.

A Survey on Security Communication and Control for Smart Grids Under Malicious Cyber Attacks

As a significant application of energy, smart grid is a complicated interconnected power grid that involves sensors, deployment strategies, smart meters, and real-time data processing. It continuously generates data with large volume, high velocity, and diverse variety. In this paper, we first give a brief introduction on big data, smart grid, and big data application in the smart grid scenario. Then, recent studies and developments are summarized in the context of integrated architecture and key enabling technologies. Meanwhile, security issues are specifically addressed. Finally, we introduce several typical big data applications and point out future challenges in the energy domain.

Energy big data: A survey

Energy router (ER) based system is a crucial part of the energy transmission and management under the circumstance of energy Internet for green cities. During its design process, a sound formal verification and a performance monitoring scheme are needed to check its reliability and meaningful quantitative properties. In this paper, we provide formal verification solutions for an ER-based system by proposing a continuous-time Markov chain model describing the architecture of the ER-based system. To verify real-world function of the ER-based system, we choose electricity trading to propose a Markov decision process model based on an ER subsystem to describe the trading behavior. To monitor the system performance, we project the energy scheduling process in the ER-based system, and then implement this scheduling process on top of a cloud computing experiment tool. Finally, we perform extensive experiment evaluations to investigate the system reliability properties, quantitative properties, and scheduling behaviors. The experiment verifies the effectiveness of the proposed models and the monitoring scheme.

Probabilistic Model Checking and Scheduling Implementation of an Energy Router System in Energy Internet for Green Cities

In integrated energy systems (IESs), traditional fixed time-interval dispatching scheme is unable to adapt to the need of dynamic properties of the transient network, demand response characteristics, dispatching time scales in energy subsystems and renewable power uncertainties. This scheme may easily result in uneconomic source-grid-load-storage operations in IES. In this paper, we propose a dispatching method for IES based on dynamic time-interval of model predictive control (MPC). We firstly build models for energy sub-systems and multi-energy loads in the power-gas-heat IES. Then, we develop an innovative optimization method leveraging trajectory deviation control, energy control, and cost control frameworks in MPC to handle the requirements and constraints over the time-interval of dispatching. Finally, a dynamic programming algorithm is introduced to efficiently solve the proposed method. Experiments and simulation results prove the effectiveness of the method.

/pdf/a-dispatching-method-for-integrated-energy-system-based-on-4j3kks51mc.pdf

A Dispatching Method for Integrated Energy System Based on Dynamic Time-interval of Model Predictive Control

Adopting FPGA as an accelerator in datacenters is becoming mainstream for customized computing, but the fact that FPGAs are hard to program creates a steep learning curve for software programmers. Even with the help of high-level synthesis (HLS), accelerator designers still have to manually perform code reconstruction and cumbersome parameter tuning to achieve the optimal performance. While many learning models have been leveraged by existing work to automate the design of efficient accelerators, the unpredictability of modern HLS tools becomes a major obstacle for them to maintain high accuracy. In this paper, we address this problem by incorporating an automated DSE framework-AutoDSE- that leverages bottleneck-guided gradient optimizer to systematically find abetter design point. AutoDSE finds the bottleneck of the design in each step and focuses on high-impact parameters to overcome that, which is similar to the approach an expert would take. The experimental results show that AutoDSE is able to find the design point that achieves, on the geometric mean, 19.9x speedup over one CPU core for Machsuite and Rodinia benchmarks and 1.04x over the manually designed HLS accelerated vision kernels in Xilinx Vitis libraries yet with 26x reduction of their optimization pragmas. With less than one optimization pragma per design on average, we are making progress towards democratizing customizable computing by enabling software programmers to design efficient FPGA accelerators.

AutoDSE: Enabling Software Programmers to Design Efficient FPGA Accelerators

To reduce time delay of processing data and improve the efficiency of cloud computing, a clustering algorithm based on the principle of minimum distance is proposed to place user-based and item-based data, update cluster centre and the threshold dynamically. Besides, consistent hashing is combined to solve the fault tolerance and scalability issues. In addition, Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) algorithm and item-based Coordination Filtering (CF) algorithms are used for filling sparse matrix to achieve better effect on the user-based clustering. Simulation results show that compared with data placement strategy based on K-means algorithm, this data placement strategy significantly improves clustering accuracy, greatly reduces delay of processing data and increases database scalability and redundancy, thereby improving the efficiency of cloud computing.

Min Gao

Papers

Energy big data: A survey

Probabilistic Model Checking and Scheduling Implementation of an Energy Router System in Energy Internet for Green Cities

A Dispatching Method for Integrated Energy System Based on Dynamic Time-interval of Model Predictive Control

AutoDSE: Enabling Software Programmers to Design Efficient FPGA Accelerators

A data placement strategy based on clustering and consistent hashing algorithm in cloud computing