SAEPOG 2012 - Secure Autonomous Electric Power Grids Workshop

Electric energy grids worldwide are becoming smarter and more adaptive to efficiently bring power from a wide variety of production technologies to a broad consumer base. With this increase in complexity and adaptivity we see an ever-increasing demand for predictable power availability and cost-optimizing control of power consumption (and local generation where available) among consumers. “Security” in the grid has many dimensions, from protecting national resources against human adversaries to simply guaranteeing the availability of power to customers. This workshop is concerned with creating autonomous electric power grids that are secure in all senses of the word.
Traditional power management models rely heavily on a centralized authority to dispatch generation and curtail load without any means for consumers to affect the decision process. The increasing dependence on renewable sources of energy invalidates the currently prevailing paradigm “supply follows demand” for energy management, since power generation from wind or solar panels is not controllable and only partially predictable. The resulting new paradigm “demand follows supply” inherently depends on the discovery and exploitation of demand flexibility which implies the necessity of a decentralized energy information system with distributed system intelligence for power management and control. Obviously, distributed control also implies potential security concerns for the system and those who rely on it.
This situation calls for power generation, storage, and distribution systems that are “aware” of the supply and demand situation and can adapt the load automatically, quickly, and stably. This workshop, will examine how autonomous self-adaptive and self-organizing systems may be designed for energy management and control in the future smart grid ranging from national or international high-voltage transportation systems to low-voltage local distribution systems. We will also consider smart combination with other networks like natural gas or thermal grids. We will discuss how existing systems can be made more autonomic (e.g., self-*) and how the designers of new systems can ensure that these systems deliver power within design constraints reliably.
The important management challenge is to create dependable, decentralized control and collaboration of the many stakeholders like transportation system operators, distribution system operators and demand-side managers. This is a highly complex system whose complexity is not determined merely by its size. Future power grids are loosely integrated cyber-physical-human systems that combine traditional power control with smart information, communication, and technology, etc. The daunting security and management challenges that arise from these interdependent couplings will require much research for many years to come. Topics of interest for papers and demonstrations include (but are not limited to) the following:
Bounded adaptivity or control; planning for emergence
Control algorithms for stable, distributed power allocation
System resilience in the face of large-scale outages or natural disasters?
Bounded adaptivity (maintaining dynamic stability in an adaptive power system)?
Additional uses for the highly adaptive power grid?
The effects of electric vehicles on the adaptive grid?
Self-* features
Self-adaptive distributed generation and renewables integration?
Human factors in an autonomic power grid (for users, owners, and maintainers)?
Nature-inspired solutions for grid management?
Self-organizing provisioning of balancing power, demand response, and other power system services.
Self-healing power grids?
Security and Privacy
Smart grid security and self-protection?
Power availability
Cyber security
Ensuring consumers' needs and desires are met
Anonymizing consumer information
Distributed analytics and control
Decentralized analytics for power flows (e.g. detection of faulty meters, power theft prevention, and power flow monitoring)?
Economic models of adaptive power systems?
Situational awareness and response
Safety-critical coordination of multiple agents (e.g., “lock-out/tag-out” for line safety)
We encourage authors to submit papers in one of two themes:
Papers that develop a big-picture architecture and framework to implement fully autonomous, full-scale power grids ? these papers should be suitable in format and quality for a conference track, but avoid being merely an evolution of currently published ideas.
Papers that demonstrate how a new technique (or a technology from another discipline) can be successfully applied to a full-scale autonomous power system ? these papers should clearly explain how a technology from one area can be applied to another. They should allow researchers from multiple disciplines to grasp the contribution and should form a coherent technical argument generalizing the material to other areas.
We encourage authors to consider safety, reliability, and community acceptance in all submissions. Concept papers are acceptable; however, including studies (math models, simulations, and even pilot deployments) will be reviewed more favorably. In addition to the presentation of papers, we anticipate several open discussion and/or demonstration sessions where participants can show their latest work in progress and discuss topics associated with the themes above. We will accept abstract-only submissions representing such works-in-progress or demonstrations.
Format, Submission and Proceedings: We plan the workshop to last a whole day, including paper presentations and at least two open discussion forums. In the morning, we will discuss open research questions on how adaptive systems with emergent features can be used in safety critical applications like the power grid. In the afternoon we will have another open forum where participants may demonstrate their recent work related to the workshop theme.
Papers should be no longer than 6 pages in standard IEEE two-column format. All manuscripts should be submitted in PDF form via EasyChair. We ask that authors direct all questions to with "SAEPOG 2012" in the title indicating that the question is regarding this workshop.
The authoritative version of this call for papers and workshop information is at http://sites.google.com/site/saepog/.