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Electric power distribution systems will encounter fluctuations in supply due to the introduction of renewable sources with high variability in generation capacity. It is therefore necessary to provide algorithms that are capable of dynamically finding approximate solutions. We propose two semi-distributed algorithms based on ADMM and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. One of the algorithms computes a feasible approximate of the optimal power allocation at each instance. We require coordination between the nodes to guarantee feasibility of each of the iterates. We bound the distance from the approximate solutions to the optimal solution as a function of the variation in optimal power allocation. Finally, we verify our results via experiments.
This paper shows the capability the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has to track, in a distributed manner, the optimal down-link beam-forming solution in a multiple input multiple output (MISO) multi-cell network given a dynamic channel. Each time the channel changes, ADMM is allowed to perform one algorithm iteration. In order to implement the proposed scheme, the base stations are not required to exchange channel state information (CSI), but will require to exchange interference values once. We show ADMMs tracking ability in terms of the algorithms Lyapunov function given that the primal and dual solutions to the convex optimization problem at hand can be understood as a continuous mapping from the problems parameters. We show that this holds true even considering that the problem looses strong convexity when it is made distributed. We then show that these requirements hold for the down-link, and consequently up-link, beam-forming case. Numerical examples corroborating the theoretical findings are also provided.
Due to limited metering infrastructure, distribution grids are currently challenged by observability issues. On the other hand, smart meter data, including local voltage magnitudes and power injections, are communicated to the utility operator from grid buses with renewable generation and demand-response programs. This work employs grid data from metered buses towards inferring the underlying grid state. To this end, a coupled formulation of the power flow problem (CPF) is put forth. Exploiting the high variability of injections at metered buses, the controllability of solar inverters, and the relative time-invariance of conventional loads, the idea is to solve the non-linear power flow equations jointly over consecutive time instants. An intuitive and easily verifiable rule pertaining to the locations of metered and non-metered buses on the physical grid is shown to be a necessary and sufficient criterion for local observability in radial networks. To account for noisy smart meter readings, a coupled power system state estimation (CPSSE) problem is further developed. Both CPF and CPSSE tasks are tackled via augmented semi-definite program relaxations. The observability criterion along with the CPF and CPSSE solvers are numerically corroborated using synthetic and actual solar generation and load data on the IEEE 34-bus benchmark feeder.
Large scale, non-convex optimization problems arising in many complex networks such as the power system call for efficient and scalable distributed optimization algorithms. Existing distributed methods are usually iterative and require synchronization of all workers at each iteration, which is hard to scale and could result in the under-utilization of computation resources due to the heterogeneity of the subproblems. To address those limitations of synchronous schemes, this paper proposes an asynchronous distributed optimization method based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) for non-convex optimization. The proposed method only requires local communications and allows each worker to perform local updates with information from a subset of but not all neighbors. We provide sufficient conditions on the problem formulation, the choice of algorithm parameter and network delay, and show that under those mild conditions, the proposed asynchronous ADMM method asymptotically converges to the KKT point of the non-convex problem. We validate the effectiveness of asynchronous ADMM by applying it to the Optimal Power Flow problem in multiple power systems and show that the convergence of the proposed asynchronous scheme could be faster than its synchronous counterpart in large-scale applications.
Resource allocation under uncertainty is a classical problem in city-scale cyber-physical systems. Consider emergency response as an example; urban planners and first responders optimize the location of ambulances to minimize expected response times to incidents such as road accidents. Typically, such problems deal with sequential decision-making under uncertainty and can be modeled as Markov (or semi-Markov) decision processes. The goal of the decision-maker is to learn a mapping from states to actions that can maximize expected rewards. While online, offline, and decentralized approaches have been proposed to tackle such problems, scalability remains a challenge for real-world use-cases. We present a general approach to hierarchical planning that leverages structure in city-level CPS problems for resource allocation. We use emergency response as a case study and show how a large resource allocation problem can be split into smaller problems. We then use Monte-Carlo planning for solving the smaller problems and managing the interaction between them. Finally, we use data from Nashville, Tennessee, a major metropolitan area in the United States, to validate our approach. Our experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches used in the field of emergency response.
A recent research direction in data-driven modeling is the identification of dynamic networks, in which measured vertex signals are interconnected by dynamic edges represented by causal linear transfer functions. The major question addressed in this paper is where to allocate external excitation signals such that a network model set becomes generically identifiable when measuring all vertex signals. To tackle this synthesis problem, a novel graph structure, referred to as textit{directed pseudotree}, is introduced, and the generic identifiability of a network model set can be featured by a set of disjoint directed pseudotrees that cover all the parameterized edges of an textit{extended graph}, which includes the correlation structure of the process noises. Thereby, an algorithmic procedure is devised, aiming to decompose the extended graph into a minimal number of disjoint pseudotrees, whose roots then provide the appropriate locations for excitation signals. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be adapted using the notion of textit{anti-pseudotrees} to solve a dual problem, that is to select a minimal number of measurement signals for generic identifiability of the overall network, under the assumption that all the vertices are excited.