Formal Synthesis of Controllers for Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems: Developments and Challenges

In recent years, formal methods have been extensively used in the design of autonomous systems. By employing mathematically rigorous techniques, formal methods can provide fully automated reasoning processes with provable safety guarantees for complex dynamic systems with intricate interactions between continuous dynamics and discrete logics. This paper provides a comprehensive review of formal controller synthesis techniques for safety-critical autonomous systems. Specifically, we categorize the formal control synthesis problem based on diverse system models, encompassing deterministic, non-deterministic, and stochastic, and various formal safety-critical specifications involving logic, real-time, and real-valued domains. The review covers fundamental formal control synthesis techniques, including abstraction-based approaches and abstraction-free methods. We explore the integration of data-driven synthesis approaches in formal control synthesis. Furthermore, we review formal techniques tailored for multi-agent systems (MAS), with a specific focus on various approaches to address the scalability challenges in large-scale systems. Finally, we discuss some recent trends and highlight research challenges in this area

Efficiency and Sustainability of the Distributed Renewable Hybrid Power Systems Based on the Energy Internet, Blockchain Technology and Smart Contracts

The climate changes that are visible today are a challenge for the global research community. In this context, renewable energy sources, fuel cell systems, and other energy generating sources must be optimally combined and connected to the grid system using advanced energy transaction methods. As this book presents the latest solutions in the implementation of fuel cell and renewable energy in mobile and stationary applications such as hybrid and microgrid power systems based on energy internet, blockchain technology, and smart contracts, we hope that they are of interest to readers working in the related fields mentioned above

Adaptive wide area protection of power systems

Studies of major blackouts reveal that power system protection devices have contributed to a majority of system disturbances. This leads to efforts of improving protection Philosophy;;Analysis shows that conventional protection relies on coordination among stand-alone relays to obtain a dependability-biased component-protection scheme. Whereas it is more desirable and also feasible nowadays for an integrated approach to both component and system protection, provided modern relays possessing the ability of sharing information and applying intelligence in decision-making.;This dissertation proposes the adaptive protection concept for wide area systems. The scope of the research includes identifying and developing the desired architecture, intelligent algorithms and communication needs that facilitate the protection system to avoid and reduce the impact of system emergencies.;The purpose of this research work is to conceptualize and nurture adaptive protection concept for wide area systems, and to conduct feasibility studies to make this concept practically viable. Several case studies are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive protection scheme. In addition, voltage stability, which is a classic wide area problem, can be alleviated with the proposed concept. Steady state and transient simulation studies provided encouraging results. The detailed decision-making algorithms are simulated in several examples for validation of the concept