Contact: Dan-Cristian Tomozei
The electricity distribution grid is undergoing a transformation process. More and more “smart” control devices are deployed to mitigate the stochasticity of increased renewable production and steer the grid towards stable operation.
EPFL is also deploying the Smart-Grid. Within this deployment various distributed control algorithms will be used. Control devices implementing these algorithms communicate with each other and take local control decisions (for example, such a device can instruct a battery to start a charging cycle, in order to consume excess energy production from solar panels). They use encryption for securing communication.
The goal of this project is to evaluate and compare the performance of various candidate control devices, such as the celebrated Raspberry Pi, Cotton Candy, PandaBoard, etc.
Project plan
This semester project is aimed for one or two bachelor or master students.
In a first stage, you will implement a distributed control algorithm that will run on all the test platforms.
In the second stage, you will test the performance limits of the devices, by making them run the control algorithm while subjecting them to various levels of stress (e.g., network traffic, CPU load, etc.).
At the end of the project you will submit a final report that may lead to a publication in a conference, or journal.
The project will be supervised by Dan-Cristian Tomozei (LCA 2).
Required skills:
- Knowledge of performance evaluation: statistical tests, confidence intervals, etc.
- Knowledge of a programming/scripting language (C/Python preferred)
- Basic knowledge of shell scripting
References:
- Performance Evaluation Of Computer And Communication Systems, Jean-Yves Le Boudec
- Raspberry Pi, Cotton Candy, PandaBoard
- Dynamic Network Energy Management via Proximal Message Passing M. Kraning, E. Chu, J. Lavaei, and S. Boyd