Marija Ilic
Friday, April 9, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Room 205, 8 St. Mary’s St.
(Photonics Building)
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department of Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
“A Decision Making Framework and Simulator for Sustainable Electric Energy Systems”
In this talk, we develop an IT-enabled decision making framework for cooperative incentives-driven utilization of the existing resources and for sustainable investments in new technologies. We point out that in order to achieve a long-term sustainable energy utilization, it is essential to provide necessary information to internalize the value of just-in-time (JIT), just-in-place (JIP) and just-in-context (JIC) distributed adaptation across the entire supply chain, ranging from the smallest consumers and energy providers, through their aggregators and system coordinators. This would avoid to a large extent technology bias. We illustrate using our model-based novel simulator how a carefully designed multi-directional and multi-temporal information exchange could enable sustainable decision making while accounting for unique needs and capabilities of various resources. At the same time, information would incentivize the resources to contribute to system-wide sustainability objectives at value. We illustrate the dependence of such decisions-driven industry evolution on the industry rules (contextual factors), as well as on the operating and planning practices for implementing the industry rules (temporal and spatial factors). Conceptual simulations are provided to illustrate strong effects of these factors on the long-term industry performance without embedding IT support, and potential improvements by means of carefully designed IT. Our model-based simulator could be used as a means of designing novel regulation defining rules, rights and responsibilities regarding the type and rate of information to be exchanged while inter-operating in support of sustainable industry evolution.
Marija Illic received her Doctor of Science Degree in Systems Science at Washington University in St. Louis, MO in 1980. She is currently a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, with a joint appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy Departments. She is the Director of the Electric Energy Systems Group (EESG), http://www.eesg.ece.cmu.edu/. She is also the Honorary Chaired Professor for Control of Future Electricity Network Operations at Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands. She was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and tenured Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was then a Senior Research Scientist in Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, from 1987 to 2002. She has 30 years of experience in teaching and research in the area of electrical power system modeling and control. Her main interest is in the systems aspects of operations, planning, and economics of the electric power industry. She has co-authored several books in her field of interest. Prof. Ilic is an IEEE Fellow.
