Control structures for competitive, market-driven power systems

Electric power networks are among the largest of human engineered systems, with dynamic performance coupled across circuits of continental scale. Effective feedback control is critical to achieve reliable provision electric power in these large scale systems. Given electricity´s importance to modern industrial societies, and the range of practically important control challenges electric power systems present, they have been a prominent application for control analysis and design over the past century. Today, new questions are being introduced by the policy shift towards use of decentralized, competitive market mechanisms for operation. This shift dictates examination of new control architectures, and opens the door to a number of interesting research issues in control system design, stability analysis, and dynamic games