Distributed State Estimation and Energy Management in Smart Grids: A Consensus ${+}$ Innovations Approach

This paper reviews signal processing research for applications in the future electric power grid, commonly referred to as smart grid. Generally, it is expected that the grid of the future would differ from the current system by the increased integration of distributed generation, distributed storage, demand response, power electronics, and communications and sensing technologies. The consequence is that the physical structure of the system becomes significantly more distributed. The existing centralized control structure is not suitable any more to operate such a highly distributed system. Hence, in this paper, we overview distributed approaches, all based on consensus +innovations, for three common energy management functions: state estimation, economic dispatch, and optimal power flow. We survey the pertinent literature and summarize our work. Simulation results illustrate tradeoffs and the performance of consensus +innovations for these three applications.