April 8, 2015: Invited Speaker Seminar: Learning from the Internet to Optimally Design Smart Grids

Dr. Yashar Giassi-Farrokhfal
 

Wednesday, April 8,2015, 10:45 a.m.
Room EV003.309

Abstract

The smart grid and the Internet are similar in many aspects. Indeed, the grid carries power flows to billions of end points in a manner that resembles the way the Internet carries traffic to billions of end systems.  This analogy allows us to adapt techniques and tools from computer networking to optimally design smart grids. In this talk, I will describe how one can use this analogy to study one of the most challenging problems in smart grids, that of optimally designing and operating storage devices to integrate large-scale renewables. This is inherently a difficult problem, due to its dependency on three unavoidably inter-correlated factors: the choice of storage devices, storage sizing, and storage operation. Joint optimization of these factors is complex, computationally expensive, and non-causal. On the other hand, decoupling these factors is still an open problem. I will show how we can adapt the powerful mathematical approach of the stochastic network calculus, originally developed for network performance analysis, to analytically solve this problem.  I will outline this technique--along with two alternative approaches--and present the interesting new insights we gain on the storage provisioning and operation using these techniques. Finally, I will present future work and my vision of how computer science, computer engineering, wireless communication systems, social network analysis, power engineering, economics, and big data can be brought together to conduct high-impact research.

Biography

Yashar Ghiassi-Farrokhfal received his M.Sc. degree from Sharif University of Technology (Tehran, Iran) in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto in 2012, both in Electrical and Computer Engineering. In 2012, he spent three months as a research intern at the Telecom Innovation Labs in Berlin, Germany. Since July 2012, he is with the Information Systems and Science for Energy (ISS4E) group at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Waterloo as a post-doctoral fellow. He has served as a peer reviewer of journals and also a member of technical program committees of conferences in multiple research fields: computer networking (e.g., IEEE INFOCOM), energy systems (e.g., IEEE Smartgridcomm, ACM e-Energy), and information systems (e.g., MIS Quarterly). His research interests are in smart grids and network performance analysis. His research focuses on the multidisciplinary aspect of smart grids, specifically, how techniques from computer networking can help improve the design and operation of smart grids.