Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Carl Hauser
Distributed Embeded Systems fo Power Grid Communication
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The electric power grid’s communication infrastructure for disseminating operational status information was designed decades ago when computer networks were much less advanced and each geographic region was served by a single power company. The grid’s communication infrastructure, a legacy of the last 40 years, is inadequate for today’s needs, increasing the grid’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks and to massive accidental failures such as the August 2003 East Coast blackout, two major blackouts in August 1996 on the West Coast, and recent blackouts in Europe. Dr. Carl Hauser and other Washington State University researchers in electrical engineering and computer science are developing a new middleware system called GridStat that brings the benefits of research in distributed systems, networking, security and trust to the communication system for the electric power grid and other distributed critical infrastructures.
The GridStat architecture consists a high-performance data plane and a separate management plane. The data plane can be easily configured to deliver each stream of status updates to multiple locations, while ensuring that each update is received with predictable latency. The data plane can be configured to deliver each stream over multiple, independent paths to increase reliability. The management plane coordinates use of resources in the data plane and manages trust and security between participants.
GridStat exemplifies embedded computer systems—those in which computers receive inputs from the physical world and in turn, exert control over the physical world. Unlike many embedded systems which are characterized as tiny, inexpensive computers running a single piece of equipment, GridStat is an embedded system on a massive, distributed scale. In these systems, considerations of size and cost of computers are secondary to efficient production of correct programs for highly complex tasks. Dr. Hauser is also doing research on programming language techniques and implementations that will bring advances from programming language research, such as automatic storage management, strong data typing, and high-level functional composition, into embedded systems of this kind. The challenges in this work derive from the time- and security-constrained nature of the target systems—aspects not usually considered outside the realm of real-time, embedded systems.
Contact
Information
Carl Hauser, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Washington
State University
PO Box 642752
Pullman, WA 99164-2752
Telephone:
509-335-6470
Fax: 509-335-3818
E-mail: chauser@wsu.edu
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