EECS Seminar: Limited-communication Coordination of Large-scale, Networked Dynamic Systems

McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)

Chinwendu Enyioha, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Electrical Engineering
Harvard University

Abstract: The prospect of a Battlefield Internet of Things (BF-IoT) and emerging commercial IoT will bring together interconnected data-generating processes, peoples and machines distinguished by unprecedented real-time access to large volumes of multimodal data. Coordinating the operation of ever-growing large scale networks offers new challenges given various constraints on resources such as energy, communication bandwidth, etc. The complex nature of emerging energy systems, for instance, presents interesting challenges. For example, balancing electricity demand with supply in real-time is communication intensive given the two-way flow of information and power between providers and users. Specifically, each time an operator in the system transmits coordination signals to users, precious bandwidth is consumed. In this talk, I will introduce some challenges in the operation of power systems and techniques we are developing to address them. Specifically, I will show how to coordinate allocation of electric power to users in a distribution system with optimized information flow, and without overloading the system capacity to avoid triggering an outage. I will also characterize the trade-off between our communication-efficient techniques and desired solution accuracy.

Bio: Chinwendu Enyioha received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Gardner-Webb University, Boiling Springs, NC,  and a doctorate in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the PRECISE Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His research lies in the areas of network science, optimization and limited-communication coordination of distributed networked systems, with applications to cyber-physical systems. Enyioha is a fellow of the Ford Foundation, was named a William Fontaine Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and has, among others, received the Mathematical Association of America Southeastern Section Patterson prize.