Talk Information 12/04/2025

Abstract: Distance relays detect faults on transmission lines. They face uncertainty from the fault’s location and resistance, as well as the current from the line’s remote terminal. In this paper, we aggregate this uncertainty with the Minkowski sum. This allows us to explicitly model the power grid surrounding the relay’s line, and in turn accommodate any mix of synchronous machines and inverter-based resources. To make the relay’s task easier, inverters can inject perturbations, or auxiliary signals, such as negative-sequence current. We use Farkas’ lemma to construct an optimization for designing inverter auxiliary signals.

Bio: Josh Taylor received the B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and the Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011, all in Mechanical Engineering. From 2011 to 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of Toronto from 2013 to 2023. He is currently an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research focuses on control and optimization of energy and water infrastructure.