| Current Electrical Energy Delivery Networks (EEDN) are managed from a centralized operations and control center. In the event of a system failure, human operators at this control centers device schemes for restoring the system back into an operational state. Such a scheme is inefficient and unreliable since a crippling failure at the control center would render the system useless. In this thesis, we present a decentralized framework to help control and manage an Electrical Energy Delivery Networks (EEDN). Our scheme is based on the idea of modelling the EEDN as a data network. The paths taking the flows of power are then controlled by devices that we call Intelligent Power Routers (IPRs). These IPRs monitor the status of the network, and when a failure occurs, they work together to open new paths to send power from the generators to the consumers (e.g. cities, factories, hospitals). In this thesis, we present the architecture of our solution, and show distributed algorithms for a particular problem: restoring the undamaged part of a EEDN after a major failure. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is reliable, effective, and scalable. More importantly, our approach can find restoration solutions that are efficient, and sometimes as good as those produced by centralized algorithms. We present a first prototype of IPRs network that has a satisfactory performance for system restoration using the new approach. |
