Secure Control Regions for Distributed Stochastic Systems with Application to Distributed Energy Resource Dispatch: Preprint

With the increasing connectedness and interdependence of systems that are stochastic in nature, the issue of how to manage and coordinate them for safe operation has evidently become more important. In many networked system architectures, the system-wide output has to be delicately managed; often within a prescribed set of bounds. In this paper, a novel control framework is proposed where the bounds on the outputs are translated into independent bounds on the controllable inputs of each subsystem. The main benefit of this framework is that respecting the individual control bounds suffices to guarantee that the system-wide outputs will remain within safe boundaries. Since the systems are assumed to be stochastic, the bounds on the output are introduced as probabilistic chance constraints. The benefits of this framework are demonstrated by applying it to the control of distributed energy resources in a distribution networks where main goal is to keep the voltage magnitudes with their prescribed bounds. The control bounds are evaluated using real data on an IEEE test system.