Alam, S M Shafiul | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2019

Analysis of Hybrid Smart Grid Communication Network Designs for Distributed Energy Resources Coordination

The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DERs) has prompted increasing interest in the monitoring and control of DERs through hybrid smart grid communications. This paper develops a new method to investigate the impact of DER penetrations and applications on hybrid communications network designs. A suite of hybrid communications simulation models are developed using Network Simulator 3 (ns-3). The smart grid communications topologies with different DER penetrations are built on the utility-scale distribution grid. The simulation results show that (i) with increasing photovoltaic penetrations, nine hybrid communications designs achieve the expected latency albeit with higher packet loss rate; and (ii) both BPLC-Ethernet and BPLC-WiMAX designs can accommodate the DER applications with a high data rate up to 100 Mbps.

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DOE OSTI2018

Simulation-Based Parameter Optimization Framework for Large-Scale Hybrid Smart Grid Communications Systems Design

The design of reliable, dynamic, fault-tolerant hybrid smart grid communication networks is a challenge to achieve for autonomous power grids. Hybrid networks use different communications technologies for different area networks. A simulation-based parameter optimization framework is proposed to tune parameters of hybrid communication technologies to achieve the optimal network performance. It consists of three main components: a parallel executor used to speedup a list of simulations; a sampler running simulations using the parallel executor at each generation; and a hybrid stochastic optimization algorithm for tuning configurable parameters of hybrid designs and applications. The proposed hybrid metaheuristic optimization algorithm combines an evolutionary algorithm with a gradient method to quickly achieve an approximately global optimum solution. Three optimization test functions are employed to train the adjustable parameters of the hybrid algorithm. Results show the proposed parameter optimization framework can help the designer choose the right hybrid architecture with an optimal parameter set for a large-scale broadband PLC-WiMAX hybrid smart grid communication network.

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