Project TASTING

Excerpt

Digital transformation of energy networks for greater system resilience and flexibility

Raphaël Caire, Teacher Researcher, Grenoble INP

ANR reference : 22-PETA-0012

Energy infrastructures, and in particular electricity infrastructures, are undergoing a major upheaval known as the 4D revolution (Decarbonization, Decentralization, Digitization and Democratization). The rapid growth in the share of renewable energies in electricity production means that we need to find solutions to ensure a balance between production and demand at all times. Securing infrastructures is also a major challenge. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which have been contributing to optimal network operation for decades, need to evolve to deliver higher performance, easier deployment and upgrading, and greater resilience.

TASTING offers new technological, cyber-physical and digital solutions that are reliable and secure, to meet these major challenges. It tackles the major challenges linked to modernizing and securing electrical systems, taking into account the cloud/edge continuum dimension. The targeted scientific challenges are related to ICT infrastructure as a key enabler and solution provider in the face of the profound changes our energy infrastructures will face in the coming decades.

Keywords: Reliability – Security – Energy infrastructures – Control algorithms – Cyber-attacks – Distributed architectures – Cyber-physical systems – Machine learning – Real-time monitoring – Intrusion detection – Adaptive tuning – Digital twins – Power networks – Optimization – Hardware deployment – Fault detection – Automatic adaptation – Network stability – Network topology

Tasks

Our researches

Infrastructure reliability and safety

The research will focus on the design of new control algorithm methods that take into account the constraints of the physical and cyber-physical layers. It will also propose runtime verification methods based on formal validation of security properties to detect cyber-attacks that may target energy infrastructures.

Distributed architectures for cyber-physical systems

• Evaluation of fully distributed control methods, such as multi-agent systems, for comparison with semi-decentralized techniques,
• Design of new consensus decision-making methods for energy networks, specially adapted to highly distributed control architectures,
• Intelligent distributed digital instrumentation, based on machine learning, for real-time health monitoring and intrusion detection in power grid communication networks,
• Adaptive, distributed frequency control to optimize local grid areas faced with intermittent power generation.

Easy deployment on hardware

This task aims to develop methods and algorithms to be implemented on hardware in digital substations. Mainly, TASTING will propose:

• numerical methods to detect faults in power networks in order to improve the stability and availability of high and medium voltage networks,
• methodologies to detect any changes in network topology and then automatically adapt model-based controllers.