An electric power grid generally consists of generators, substations, and lots and lots of transmission lines. It is an intelligently designed system, to be sure, but is not intelligent by itself. At least until recently, a power grid could not, for example, learn from its mistakes and avoid repeating them; nor could it repair itself after a failure. Not until, that is, IEEE Senior Member Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy started applying theories of computational intelligence to the field.

For that innovative work, the IEEE Industry Application Society named Venayagamoorthy its Young Outstanding Member, an annual award given to someone younger than 35 in recognition of contributions to society and the profession. Venayagamoorthy, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) and the director of the university’s Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems (RTPIS) laboratory, accepted the award at the society’s annual meeting, held 3–6 October in Hong Kong. On 11 November, the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers named Venayagamoorthy the 2005 Young Achiever and presented him the ABB PowerTech Transformers’ Award.

The goal of Venayagamoorthy’s work is simple: avoid blackouts like the one that blanketed the northeastern United States and part of Canada in August 2003. Venayagamoorthy noted that one contributing factor during a blackout is that the grid does not have foresight to detect and isolate cascading failures fast enough. To remedy that problem, he is creating a dynamic model of the power grid that can be updated in real time when operating conditions and customer loads change. With that model, Venayagamoorthy and his team hope to be able to create control systems that react quickly.

To fund his work, which is looking into brainlike control mechanisms to keep the power grid stable, Venayagamoorthy received a US $400 000 CAREER grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The award supports teacher-scholars’ career development.

Venayagamoorthy says his control mechanisms operate in many of the same ways that humans do: they learn from past mistakes and are self-healing. “Just as a small wound or bruise on our body would heal over time and not stop us from doing what we need to do, an intelligent power network repairs itself after disturbances,” Venayagamoorthy says. “The controllers that we will put on the power grid have the same ability to learn that we do. And, like humans, in 10 years, they will be more intelligent than they are now.”

His controllers actually improve on human performance in that they never repeat a mistake.

In most simulation packages on the market, he says, re-creating an operation that lasts 60 seconds on a real power grid takes 6 to 60 minutes depending on the size of the grid. But at the RTPIS laboratory—the most up-to-date of the four such labs in the United States—he is able to interface his control systems into a multiprocessor computer that simulates power grid operation in real time.

The power industry is more likely to implement a control system tested on a real-time simulation, Venayagamoorthy notes. “I’m applying intelligent techniques to power systems control to improve grid stability and reliability,” he continues, “because that’s where my expertise is. But it can be applied to any complex network, such as telecommunications, transportation, financial, or computers.”

A SHOCKING START Venayagamoorthy’s father, a physics professor first in Sri Lanka and then in Nigeria and South Africa, introduced the budding engineer to science and experimentation. When he was in grammar school, Venayagamoorthy could repeat the experiments his father’s university-level physics students were doing. Once, while working on one project, Venayagamoorthy accidentally gave himself a nasty electrical shock. He was not physically hurt—and the experience jump-started his interest in electrical engineering.

Venayagamoorthy earned a bachelor’s degree from the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University in Bauchi, Nigeria, and a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, all in electrical engineering. During and after his graduate studies, he lectured at the Durban Institute of Technology. In 1998 he was one of eight researchers from South Africa invited to a workshop cosponsored by the NSF and the National Research Foundation of South Africa on artificial intelligence and power electronics. There he met a researcher from Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, who also was interested in intelligent power system controls. The researcher later moved to UMR , and in time, Venayagamoorthy’s  collaboration with UMR took up so much of his time that he resigned from his tenured position in South Africa to go to Missouri, where he has been since 2002.

For more information on the RTPIS lab, visit http://www.ece.umr.edu/RTPIS