For SFI Professor Cris Moore, current network theory is too abstract.
“All of us in the field know in our hearts that real networks are much, much richer than the way network theorists typically deal with them,” he says.
He is co-hosting a workshop at SFI May 17-19, “Power Grids as Complex Networks: Formulating Problems for Useful Science and Science-Based Engineering,” to explore how network mathematicians can make better sense of electrical power networks.
While power networks offer particular challenges, Cris hopes lessons from the workshop might apply more generally, yielding insights for creating more reasonable abstractions of other highly dynamic networks, such as food webs.
The power grid is an “excellent choice” for advancing the field of network science, he says, because making mathematical models of power grids offers challenges beyond those of other dynamic networks.
Power network failures, for example, tend not to transmit from power station to power station in the same way that, say, infectious diseases spread from person to person. Instead, the failure of one power station or transmission line places a burden on alternate stations and transmission lines even if they are not directly connected.
Power-system engineers are experts at the regional level, Cris says, but what’s missing is a scientific understanding of what regional power grids have in common and how those grids interact both with other power grids and other networks, including other utilities, the Internet, and transportation systems.
“The goal of the workshop is to bring together network theorists with people who really understand these rich dynamics and go beyond engineering to science – to understand which variables and structures really matter at the large scale.”
Workshop co-organizers are External Professor Raissa D’Souza (UC Davis), engineering and public policy scholar Paul Hines (University of Vermont), mathematical physicist Misha Chertkov, and applied mathematician Aric Hagberg (both of Los Alamos National Laboratory).
“We invited a mixture of network theorists, electrical engineers, and power-systems engineers,” says Cris, as well as people from the optimization community interested in solving resource-allocation problems for improving power-grid robustness, including its ability to incorporate renewable sources, and reducing its vulnerability to attack. Some 25- 30 participants are expected in total, with the schedule set to allow time for discussion and for forging new collaborations.