| Smart grid is an integration of a variety of controllable energy devices such as distributed generators, distributed energy storage devices, as well as controllable loads and responsive demands that communicate among each other to coordinate optimal energy production. This distributed nature of smart grid has stirred up the research community to shift from centralized supervisory control and data acquisition based systems and study distributed solutions for energy management. In this scenario, it is very important to have an economic and flexible platform in R&D setting to test and validate the convergence, robustness, sensitivity, resilience and self healing capacity of such distributed control algorithms for energy management in smart grid under various operating conditions.;This dissertation presents design, implementation and validation of Green City, a Lego NXT based platform in R&D setting to test and validate control algorithms for distributed energy management in smart grid under various operating conditions such as network topology, communication constraints, security threats etc. Green City is designed to be (i) simple and economical so that it can be easily developed in a laboratory setting, (ii) modular so that it is easy to manage, and (iii) reconfigurable and flexible so that it supports fast prototyping of new algorithms. In Green City, easily available, inexpensive, modular, and off the shelf Lego NXT Bricks are used to emulate the distributed controllers in smart grid. The availability of various open source firmware (LeJOS, BricxCC, etc) and online support forums makes it easy to develop a Lego based laboratory platform. Furthermore, Green City uses a three-layered agent-based design by identifying entities in physical, cyber and control layers in order to increase modularity and decrease the dependency between the agents of separate layers. Standard interfaces are defined in each layer to integrate new algorithms, communication channels and energy devices to make it a readily expandable fast prototyping platform.;In order to validate the fast prototyping capability of the Green City, three distributed energy management algorithms -- (i) Incremental Welfare Consensus (IWC), (ii) Leader- Follower Incremental Cost Consensus (LFICC), and (iii) Secure LFICC are implemented. Several case studies involving dynamic network topology changes, communication constraints, security threats and changes in algorithm parameters are presented to validate simplicity, flexibility, reconfigurability, and real-time monitoring capability of the Green City. |
