Date of Award

12-2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering (Holcomb Dept. of)

Committee Chair/Advisor

Christopher Edrington

Committee Member

Zheyu Zhang

Committee Member

Robert Prucka

Committee Member

Johan Enslin

Committee Member

Gokhan Ozkan

Abstract

The role of intuition and human preferences are often overlooked in autonomous control of power and energy systems. However, the growing operational diversity of many systems such as microgrids, electric/hybrid-electric vehicles and maritime vessels has created a need for more flexible control and optimization methods. In order to develop such flexible control methods, the role of human decision makers and their desired performance metrics must be studied in power and energy systems. This dissertation investigates the concept of multi-criteria decision making as a gateway to integrate human decision makers and their opinions into complex mathematical control laws. There are two major steps this research takes to algorithmically integrate human preferences into control environments:

  • MetaMetric (MM) performance benchmark: considering the interrelations of mathematical and psychological convergence, and the potential conflict of opinion between the control designer and end-user, a novel holistic performance benchmark, denoted as MM, is developed to evaluate control performance in real-time. MM uses sensor measurements and implicit human opinions to construct a unique criterion that benchmarks the system's performance characteristics.
  • MM decision support system (DSS): the concept of MM is incorporated into multi-objective evolutionary optimization algorithms as their DSS. The DSS's role is to guide and sort the optimization decisions such that they reflect the best outcome desired by the human decision-maker and mathematical considerations.

A diverse set of case studies including a ship power system, a terrestrial power system, and a vehicular traction system are used to validate the approaches proposed in this work. Additionally, the MM DSS is designed in a modular way such that it is not specific to any underlying evolutionary optimization algorithm.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.