Dr. Devendra Shelar

Devendra Shelar Postdoctoral Associate RESIL @ CSE, CEE, MIT Google Scholar page Contact Office: 1-253c Email: <lastname>d@mit.edu

Research

My research focuses on resilient operations and control of smart electricity networks (ENs). In my Ph.D. research, I developed a quantitative framework to evaluate the resilience of smart ENs in the wake of cyberphysical disruptions. Developing this framework involved: (a) identifying appropriate resiliency metrics for the ENs (e.g. value of lost demand or increased operating costs), (b) modeling of smart grid control capabilities (e.g. dispatch of distributed energy resources 1,2, component disconnects 3, 4 or microgrid islanding 4); and (c) modeling of relevant disruption models (adversary-induced strategic disruptions of components 1-5 or weather-induced random failures 6). Then, I formulated the problem of resilent control by network operators as sequential, multi-stage deterministic 1-5 or stochastic optimization problems 6. These multi-stage problems are computationally hard to solve. However, by utilizing the optimization theory combined with the domain knowledge of power systems, I developed a computational approach to make these hard problems tractable. Through these projects, I have contributed to the fields of resilient control, and network and combinatorial optimization.

My framework captures multiple aspects of network resilience such as planning for, optimally responding to, and quickly recovering from the impact of cyberphysical disruptions. The framework allows us to determine critical or vulnerable components in the network, and resiliency-improving strategies for pre-disruption resource allocation as well as post-disruption response actions. The results provide structural insights into characteristics of secure (and insecure) smart ENs. My ultimate goal is to build a decision support system which will enable operators of ENs to identify optimal proactive as well as reactive defense strategies against disruptions resulting from a range of reliability and security failures.

My research is supported by NSF-CPS FORCES (www.cps.forces.org), research grants by Siebel Energy Institute, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), and MIT Schoettler scholarship. For my research, I have collaborated with power system and cybersecurity experts from EPRI, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Prof. Ian Hiskens from University of Michigan, and Prof. Saman Zonouz from Rutgers University.

I graduated with my Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering from MIT in June 2019. I plan to enter the job market in Fall 2020.

Resume

You can find my resume here.

Favourite Quotes

• ‘‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’’ - Mahatma Gandhi

• ‘‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’’ - Edmund Burkeac