Fixed‑Time Optimisation and Control for Fast Frequency Response in Low‑Inertia Grids

Giovedì 28 maggio 2026 | 11:00
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria - Politecnico di Milano
Sala Riunioni 2B (Ed. 20A)

Sommario

Distributed energy resources (DERs) increasingly provide services across diverse time scales, from fast frequency response to minute-level coordination of flexible loads and storage. Ensuring reliable operation under such heterogeneous conditions requires scalable control and optimisation frameworks that account for frequency-dependent requirements, network constraints, and diverse asset dynamics.

This talk presents a fixed-time control framework for frequency-varying optimisation. Motivated by Fast Frequency Response services, we consider large-scale aggregations of DERs whose delivery requirements depend explicitly on grid frequency and must be met within 1–10 seconds. By formulating a frequency-parameterised time-varying optimisation problem and analysing its solution dynamics, we develop feedback–feedforward projected algorithms with guaranteed convergence within a prescribed fixed time under feasibility constraints. A distributed architecture enables scalability and privacy preservation. The proposed controllers achieve sub-second convergence on IEEE benchmark systems and comply with the requirements of Dynamic Containment, Dynamic Moderation, and Dynamic Regulation services.

Biografia

Alessandra Parisio is a Professor of Control of Sustainable Energy Networks, in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) at the University of Manchester. She has been principal or co-investigator on research projects supported by EPSRC, Innovate UK, EC H2020 and industrial partners in the areas of building climate control and distributed optimisation and control for flexibility service and grid support provision.

Alessandra is co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Smart Buildings and has served/serves as editor of journals within the control and power system areas (e.g., IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and Applied Energy). She received the IEEE PES Outstanding Engineer Award in January 2021 and the Energy and Buildings Best Paper Award for (for a ten-year period between 2008-2017) in January 2019.

Her main research interests include Model Predictive Control, distributed optimisation and control, energy management systems under uncertainty, optimisation and control of multi-energy networks and distributed flexibility.