College of

Engineering, Architecture and Technology

Dr. Ying Zhang of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and her Ph.D. student Sungjoo Chung, with collaborators Dr. Fei Ding from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Dr. Zhaoyu Wang from Iowa State University, won the Best Paper award at the 2024 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) General Meeting for their paper “Taylor-Expansion-Based Robust Power Flow in Unbalanced Distribution Systems: A Hybrid Data-Aided Method.”

 

The IEEE PES General Meeting is recognized as the flagship conference in the power and energy engineering field. More than 1,600 papers are submitted to the conference each year, and after peer review, only the top 60-80 accepted conference papers (the number varies each year) are included in the best paper program. 

 

They bring a new perspective to AI-aided power system operation by focusing on fast yet accurate power flow calculation in complex electric distribution systems with distributed energy resources (DERs)–combining power engineering knowledge with a data-aided regression technique – to replace a blind application of "black-box" data-intensive machine learning techniques, and the latter has limited practicality in real-world grids. 

 

This hybrid method achieves significant performance synergy in terms of accuracy, calculation time, and robustness against outliers or cyberattacked measurements. As power flow calculation is of fundamental importance for grid monitoring, control, and management, the proposed framework has the potential as a building block to accelerate and advance various optimization tasks in advanced distribution management systems.

 

Sungjoo Chung, a second-year Ph.D. student, is the first author of this work and recently received the 2024 Dr. Ramakumar Family Energy Scholarship as one of the two runners-up. Early this year, Dr. Zhang's other conference paper was selected as the Best Paper Contest Finalist (Top 5) in the 2024 IEEE PES Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies.

 

IEEE PES General Meeting website: https://pes-gm.org/