February 05, 2016, Webb 1100

Energy demand and production need to be constantly matched in the power grid. The traditional paradigm to continuously adapt the production to the demand is challenged by the increasing penetration of more variable and less predictable energy sources, like solar photovoltaics and wind power. An alternative approach is the so called direct control of some inherently flexible electric loads to shape the demand. Direct control of deferrable loads presents many analogies with flow admission control in telecommunication networks: a request for network resources (bandwidth or energy) can be delayed until these resources are available in order to guarantee some performance metric. In this paper we go beyond such the analogy, showing that usual tele-traffic tools can be effectively used to control energy loads. In particular we propose a family of control schemes which can be easily tuned to achieve the wished trade-off among resources usage, control overhead and privacy leakage.

Laura Giarré received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering from the Università di Firenze, Florence, Italy and the Ph.D. degree in System Engineering from the Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1986 and 1992, respectively. She has held visiting positions at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California at Santa Barbara (CA) and at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, Cambridge, Boston (MA) (1999, 2006, 2015). Since 1993 she was Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy and since 1998 she has been Associate Professor at the Università di Palermo, Palermo, Italy. In 2013 she received the national qualification (ASN) for full professor. She served as Associate Editor of Systems and Control Letters, 1999 -2011 and IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control 2012-2015. In 2010 she was vice-chair of SING6 and in 2014 General Char of MED’14.. Her research interests include networked systems, according to a game theoretical approach with applications to wifi networks, sensor networks, inventory networks, smart grid. She worked also on identification of LPV and block oriented systems according to the worst-case paradigm with application to networked systems. Since 2011, she has been member of the Advisory Board of the Andrea Bocelli Foundation and the Scientific Coordinator of the ABF Challenges Program. She has then developed an interest in assistive technology for visually impaired persons, she organized and chaired three worlshops (2012 Pisa, 2013 Boston, 2015 Milan EXPO) on this theme and she co-founded the startup In.sight to develop systems enhancing senses trough technology