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This paper points out some key drawbacks of today’s modeling and control underlying hierarchical electric power system operations and planning as the hidden roadblocks on the way to decarbonization. We suggest that these can be overcome by enhancing today’s information exchange and control. This can be done by revealing and utilising inherent structurepreserving features of complex physical systems, and, based on this, by establishing multi-layered energy modeling. Each module (component, control area, non-utility-owned entities) can be characterized in terms of its interaction variable, and higher level models can be used to understand the interaction dynamics between different modules. Once the structure is understood, we propose nonlinear energy control for these modules which supports feed-forward self-adaptation to ensure feasible interconnected system. Based on these technology agnostic structures it becomes possible to expand today’s Balancing Authorities (BA) to multi-layered interactive intelligent Balancing Authorities (iBAs) and to introduce protocols for flexible utilization of diverse technologies over broad ranges of temporal and spatial conditions. 

This paper concerns modeling, simulations and control design of turbo-electric distributed propulsion (TeDP) systems needed to power future hybrid aircraft systems. The approach taken is the one of control co-design by which the sizing and hardware selection of components and the TeDP architecture design are pursued so that potential e ects of control and automation are accounted for from the very beginning. Unique to this approach is a multi-layered modular modeling and control approach in which technology-specific modules comprising the complex dynamical system are characterized using unified interaction variables at their interfaces with the rest of the system. The dynamical performance of the interconnected system is assessed using these technology-agnostic interface variable specifications and, as such, can be applied to any candidate architecture of interest. Importantly, even the inputs to the TeDP system coming from pilot commands are modeled using such interface variables. This new multi-layered modeling captures the dynamics of energy and power as interactions. It also has a rather straightforward physical interpretation. The paper builds on our earlier results introduced for terrestrial power systems, including small micro-grids. We show how system feasibility and stability can be checked in real-time operations by modules exchanging the information about their interaction variables and adjusting in a near-autonomous manner so that, as system conditions vary, the interconnected system still functions. No such systematic control co-design exists to the best of our knowledge, but it is needed as both new technologies and more complex, often conflicting performance objectives emerge. We illustrate the approach on a representative TeDP architecture and compare it to today’s state-of-the-art. We close with a discussion on the generalization of the method for any given candidate architecture. Having such an approach dramatically reduces the R&D&D of novel candidate architectures.