College of

Engineering, Architecture and Technology

Oklahoma State University’s Dr. Ying Zhang, assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has led a team of power system and AI researchers to win the runner-up of the American-Made Challenges Competition: Data-Driven Distributed (3D) Solar Visibility Prize.

 

This competition is organized by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. The collaborative team between OSU and Southern Methodist University, Pokes and Mustangs, will receive a $25,000 cash prize.  Zhang’s team is one of the top performers, among 35 teams from the U.S. industry and academia, including University of California Berkeley, Northeastern University and other land-grant universities.

 

This competition was held in August and lasted for one month, comprised of two practice weeks and two contest weeks. During the contest weeks, all teams were provided real measurements from various electric meters and required to estimate the voltage results in two distribution systems, through the publicly available, open-source data and software platform, Open Energy Data Initiative Solar Integration. Each day teams were assigned an anonymous gemstone to represent their results on the leaderboard.  Zhang’s team found theirs at the top as OEDI SI ranked them as the top performing team when compared against a set of industry standard metrics.

 

Zhang’s team customized a new physics-informed AI algorithm for real-world large-scale distribution grid monitoring to achieve multi-facet robustness against data missing, unknown measurement error, and topology changes of power network connection. Furthermore, this work enables utility companies and grid operators to make better informed decisions that optimize the distribution of solar energy technologies. 

 

This algorithm was built on Zhang’s physical model-based and data-driven state estimation research in electric distribution systems over the past several years, which started at the ECE department of her Alma Mater SMU and grows in the supportive environment of OSU and the College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology.

 

The team members include Ph.D. student Yuanshuo Zhang, working under Zhang’s supervision, Ph.D. student Yihao Wang and his supervisor Dr. Eric Larson. Larson is currently an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at SMU, and received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from OSU in 2008, advised by Prof. Damon Chandler. The success of this teamwork is a testament of top-quality electrical engineering and computer science education and interdisciplinary smart grid research from these two universities.