Dr. Jin Wen was recently funded by the NSF Cyber-Physical-System program for her proposal “CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: SMARTER – Smart Manager for Adaptive and Real-Time  decisions in building clustERs”.  This is a collaborative proposal among three universities: Arizona State University (Teresa Wu, PI); Drexel University (Jin Wen); and University of Buffalo (Kemper Lewis).  The total budget of this grant is one million dollars and the Drexel portion is $400k.  A brief description of the proposal follows:

The objective of this project is to develop a decision framework to enable real-time autonomous, robust, and optimal building energy system operation decisions for temporally and spatially distributed building clusters. It is envisioned that similar to micro-communities in a human society, neighboring buildings will have the tendency to form a cluster, an open cyber-physical system to exploit the economic opportunities provided by a smart grid, distributed power generation, and storage devices. Through optimized demand management, these building clusters will then reduce overall primary energy consumption and peak time electricity consumption, and be more resilient to power disruption.