On November 16, 2015, Yakup Koç obtained his doctorate with distinction for his dissertation titled “On robustness of Power Grids”. Koç obtained his doctorate within 4 years as part of the NWO project RobuSmart: Increasing the Robustness of Smart Grids through distributed energy generation: a complex network approach.
Koç already received 4 best paper awards for earlier publications in this field. His dissertation was supervised by Frances Brazier (TBM) and Rob Kooij (EWI) and co-supervised by Martijn Warnier (TBM).
Summary of his dissertation:
Current and future trends in environmental, economical, and human-caused factors (such as power demand growth, over-ageing of assets in power grids and extreme weather conditions) challenge power grid robustness in the near future, necessitating research to better analyse and understand the notion of robustness in power grids, and ultimately to enhance it. This dissertation investigates the robustness of power grids from a Complex Networks Theory perspective to develop concepts and measures to quantitatively assess power grid robustness. A set of metrics are proposed to quantitatively assess the robustness of power transmission and distribution grids accounting for the impact of the key system characteristics such as the operative state and the topology.
The proposed metrics provide means to exploit the relationship between the topology, operation, and robustness performance of power grids. They are experimentally validated using models of power grids, and applied on IEEE power systems, synthetically generated power grids, and real world power grids. The proposed metrics assist grid operators for dynamical optimization of flow and topology of a given power grid, and grid analysts in strategic asset management and network expansion planning processes for the purpose of robustness enhancement of a power grid.