News

2023 NAPS Best Graduate Paper Award

Jinning Wang presented CURENT LTB packages, AGVis, and DiME, on the 55th Annual North American Power Symposium (NAPS) in Asheville, North Carolina. The paper titled "DiME and AGVis: A Distributed Messaging Environment and Geographical Visualizer for Large-Scale Power System Simulation" was awarded the Best Paper Graduate Award at the conference.

2020 R&D 100

The CURENT Large Scale Testbed (LTB) for cyber-physical power grid simulation led by the CURENT research center (headquartered at The University of Tennessee) has been selected as a recipient of the 2020 R&D 100 Awards, which are known as the most prestigious innovation awards program for the past 56 years, honoring 100 great R&D revolutionary ideas and products each year in science and technology.

Our Journey So Far: A Brief Look at LTB’s Development

Around 2014-2015, a few years after the creation of the CURENT research center, the center director Dr. Kevin Tomsovic initiated the idea of developing a software-based, closed-loop testbed for CURENT. Since he was the overall director of CURENT with a super busy schedule, Dr. Tomsovic asked Dr. Fran Li to lead the development work of what is now called CURENT Large-scale Testbed (LTB) or CLTB.

In the first a couple of years of CLTB development, the team developed models of the North American power grid including WECC and reduced EI operation and planning models with various renewable energy penetration scenarios. A nationwide HVDC overlay, inspired by the MISO HVDC overlay topology, was also created. Meanwhile, external simulation engines were employed with in-house scripts to form a closed-loop simulation study on CLTB’s own North American models.

Around 2017, the CLTB team decided to develop our own dynamic simulation engine called ANDES to achieve flexibility of the CLTB platform. Dr. Hantao Cui has been the lead developer of ANDES since then. He first developed the initial version in Python and then advanced ANDES with a symbolic programming library. Now, ANDES serves as a cornerstone package in CLTB and can be used as a standalone dynamic simulation tool as well. Dr. Hantao Cui has been maintaining the ANDES package. Jinning Wang joined the effort as a helper since 2021. Around the same timeframe from 2018 to 2023, newer versions of DiME and visualizer (now called AGVis) were developed. Several key contributors include Nick West, Nicholas Parsly, and Jinning Wang.

In spring 2023, the CLTB team was working on the development of a new package called AMS which is an economic dispatch and market simulation package. It is designed to be integrated with ANDES to perform co-simulation of economic dispatch and dynamic simulation to form a true “digital twin” across multi-timescale.

Research Collaborations

Are you looking for a partner to advance your research in power systems simulation and analysis? CURENT LTB has a team of experts committed to advancing the state of the art in power systems technology, and we welcome collaborations with academic institutions, research organizations, and industry partners. Our research collaborations cover a wide range of topics:

• Power system dynamics and high-performance computing
• Cyber-physical power grid and communication co-simulation, and hardware-in-the-loop control
• Deep learning methods and applications in non-linear dynamic system operation and control
• Microgrid and smart distribution system control with distributed energy resources
• Dispatch-dynamic co-simulation for a comprehensive understanding of power system behavior
• Distributed energy resources for grid services

To learn more about our research collaborations and how we can work together, contact Dr. Fran Li at fli6@utk.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!