04/17/2015
DRCN 2015's Best Paper Award goes to iSchool Telecommunications Faculty and Students
We are proud to announce that a paper authored by School of Information Sciences (iSchool) faculty and students has won the best paper award at the 11th International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN 2015).
The paper, entitled “On Smart Grid Communications Reliability,” was co-authored by Dr. David Tipper, Associate Professor at the iSchool at Pitt, along with Velin Kounev, PhD Telecommunications student, Martin Levesque, Post-Doctoral Scholar, and Teresa Gomes, Professor at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. The paper will appear in the proceedings published by the IEEE, so keep an eye out for it! Read more >
In the meantime, here’s the abstract:
In this paper, we discuss the communications reliability requirements posed by the smart power grid with a focus on communications in support of wide area situational awareness. Implementation of wide area situational awareness relies on both transmission substation networks and wide area optical networks. We study the reliability of a sample communications network of the California Power Grid and find that its reliability falls short of proposed requirements. To overcome this issue, we consider the problem of designing the network to meet the reliability requirements while minimizing the network cost. Therefore, we propose two greedy iterative heuristics and a heuristic integer linear programming (H-ILP) model using minimum cut-sets for network reliability optimization. The greedy iterative algorithms outperform the H-ILP approach in terms of cost, but require a larger amount of computing resources. Both proposed models are in fact complementary and thus provide a framework to optimize the reliability of smart grid communications networks.
