EPRI Project Manager

EPRI ORDERING INFORMATION The North American power grid faces many challenges that it was not designed and engineered to handle. Congestion and atypical power flows threaten to overwhelm the system, while demand increases for higher reliability and—since September 11, 2001—better protection. The potential ramifications of grid failures have never been greater, as transport, communications, finance, and other critical infrastructures depend on secure, reliable electricity supplies for energy and control. The Complex Interactive Networks/Systems Initiative (CIN/SI), funded equally by EPRI and U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), developed a mathematical basis and practical tools for improving the security, performance, and robustness of critical energy, transport, financial, and communications infrastructure. Background Virtually every crucial economic and social human function of modern society depends on secure, reliable operation of interconnected infrastructures for energy, communications, transport, finance, and more. Robust, reliable operation of these multi-scale, distributed, and highly interactive infrastructures presents unique and growing challenges. No single entity has complete control of networks such as the electric power grid or the Internet, or the ability to evaluate, monitor, manage, and protect them in real time. Moreover, the conventional mathematical methodologies that underpin today's top-down modeling and control paradigm are unable to handle the complexity and connectedness of these infrastructure systems. And new threats of terror attacks on U.S. infrastructure heighten the challenge. Because modern infrastructure systems are so highly interconnected, a change in conditions at any one location can have immediate impacts over a wide area, and the effect of a local disturbance even can be magnified as it propagates through a network. Large-scale cascade failures can occur—almost instantaneously—with consequences in remote regions or seemingly unrelated businesses. On the North American power grid, for example, transmission lines link all electricity generation and distribution on the continent. Wide-area outages in the late 1990s underscore the grid's vulnerability to cascading effects. Complex adaptive systems and other emerging sciences provide an attractive bottom-up paradigm for modeling, simulation, control, optimization, and protection of operations—both financial and physical—in complex networks. Practical methods, tools, and technologies based on advances in the these fields are allowing power grids and other infrastructures to self regulate, including automatic reconfiguration in the event of failures, threats, or disturbances. Objectives To create revolutionary self-stabilizing, self-optimizing, and self-healing capabilities for the electric power grid and interconnected communications, transport, and financial infrastructures. vi Approach CIN/SI was initiated in mid-1998 in response to growing concerns about the vulnerability of …