December 05, 2014, Webb 1100

In a world with an increasing energy demand, different strategies are being proposed for the efficient exploitation of (alternative) energy sources. In particular, the introduction of new of smart inverters, storage and other intelligent devices can make the penetration of renewables feasible. Motivated by this scenario, we present preliminary work on distributed algorithms that can find application in the management of micro-grids such as electric vehicle charging and joint PV and storage control. The algorithms are based on current developments in distributed optimization and load balancing subject to capacity constraints.

Sonia Martínez is a Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Prof. Martínez received her Ph.D. degree in Engineering Mathematics from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in May 2002. Following a year as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Technical University of Catalonia, Spain, she obtained a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellowship and held appointments at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign during 2004, and at the Center for Control, Dynamical systems and Computation (CCDC) of the University of California, Santa Barbara during 2005. From January 2006 to June 2010, she was an Assistant Professor with the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. From July 2010 to June 2014, she was an Associate Professor with the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

In a broad sense, Dr Martínez' main reseach interests include networked control systems, multi-agent systems, nonlinear control theory and robotics. In particular, she has focused on the modeling and control of robotic sensor networks, the development of distributed coordination algorithms for groups of autonomous vehicles, and the geometric control of mechanical systems. For her work on the control of underactuated mechanical systems she received the Best Student Paper award at the 2002 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. She was the recipient of a NSF CAREER Award in 2007. For the paper "Motion coordination with Distributed Information," co-authored with Jorge Cortés and Francesco Bullo, she received the 2008 Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award.