Sharif University of Technology, Research has been
conducted and going on over the last twenty five years to solving many
challenges of the power system operation and control nationally and
internationally. My contributions to power system reliability evaluation
include the extensively documented analyses of the “well-being framework” of
power systems and have been at the forefront of research which are being
extended by industry engineers for practical implementations. Providing
sufficient and risk-informed information to power system operators to manage
the system reliability, my contribution has been an important innovation and
was extremely well received by the power system reliability research
community and created considerable interest in electric power industry. Over
the years, my distinctive contributions to the power system reliability
evaluation have been extended to the cost/worth analysis of Wide Area
Measurement System (WAMS) design and Phasor Measurement Unit placement for
enhancing the power system reliability, which are also followed by other
researchers across the globe.
My
innovative work on situational awareness and controllability of power
systems would smartly surpass a critical condition when a failure in
monitoring and control functions could spread the consequences throughout
the power grid. Asset management and the implementation of reliability
centered maintenance (RCM) on power distribution system is another major
contribution developed. I have been leading RCM efforts both in its
preliminary stages and its implementation in several power distribution
companies in a number of Provinces in Iran, where it saw huge success,
saving the power distribution systems significant costs.
My
research team has been and are collaborating with the electric power
industry personnel in Iran to implement the proposed methodologies in the
nation-wide bulk power grid. In the context of smart distribution systems, a
reliability evaluation approach has been developed for predicting the
reliability performance of the electric power distribution systems when
employing smart grid technologies. The research concern in these works was
to address new challenges and opportunities faced by power distribution
companies (DISCOs) that affect the optimal planning and operation
decisions. In this regard, new methods were proposed for distribution
system planning (DSP) considering the smart grid and distribution automation
(DA) technologies, methods for planning of DA and models for integrated DA
and capacity expansion planning. By increasing the penetration of
distributed energy resources (DERs) in power distribution networks, these
resources and their associated uncertainties have been modeled in the
distribution network expansion planning problem. We also extended the
proposed models, algorithms and frameworks on the reliability evaluation of
the power grid to its response against extreme events. Our research on this
front has been focused to improve the resilience of electric power systems
to devastating threats through advanced and computationally-efficient
algorithms, decision making support tools, and innovative models that are
capable of handling the emerging concerns and challenges associated with the
smart power grids. In particular, I advocate for an enhanced fusion of data
via high-performance computing for power system’s online situational
awareness, and faster-than-real-time monitoring and control decisions
specifically tailored to realizing a heightened resilience to evolving
environmental stressors and cyber-physical threats. This ground-breaking
research has offered and will provide the electric industry with innovative
toolsets that enable computationally-efficient, fast, and accurate decisions
for resilience and recovery efficiency of the smart grids that could
potentially lead to sizeable monetary savings and an enriched overall social
welfare. More critically, successful development and execution of these
research outcomes and technological solutions could help reduce undesirable
social, psychological, and physical outcomes associated with prolonged power
outages, e.g., premature death, injury, social unrest, etc.
As a consequence of power system restructuring, performance-based
regulations (PBR) have been widely adopted in the power
distribution
sector. My reliability research team has performed research and industrial
projects on reliability incentive schemes
in two
distinctive paths,
namely regulatory design and implementation of the schemes as well as
reliability-constrained
economic evaluations for power distribution
companies. Several of these efforts has led to pilot implementation of his
proposed
frameworks, witnessing significant annual cost saving.
