Iowa State is part of a four-university consortium that received a multi-million-dollar research grant from the Electric Power Research Insititute and the Department of Defense to develop advanced concepts and technologies for defense against catastrophic failures in the electric power infrastructure.

Known as the Advanced Power Technologies Consortium, the multidisciplinary team will develop a new, systems approach that will take advantage of new and emerging techniques in information, sensing, control and optimization, intelligent systems, signal processing, and economics.

The ISU team includes faculty from ECpE and the mathematics and economics departments. Iowa State’s funding is $1.48 million over five years. Other consortium members are Arizona State University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Washington.

The researchers are working to create a wide-area intelligent, adaptive protection and control system that empowers the future power grids by providing critical and extensive information in real time. It will assess system vulnerability quickly, and perform timely self-healing and adaptive reconfiguration actions based on system-
wide consideration.

Although emphasis is on developing applications for the electric power infrastructure, many of the concepts and technologies originated are expected to be relevant to other critical infrastructure systems—such as large telecommunication and computer networks with many autonomous controllers—that face similar challenges of maintaining secure operation
in spite of unexpected failures.