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Person

Univ.-Prof.

Ferdinanda Ponci

PhD Universitätsprofessorin

Teaching and Research Area Monitoring and Distributed Control for Power Systems

Teaching and Research Area Monitoring and Distributed Control for Power Systems

Address

Room: 10.07

Mathieustrasse 10

52074 Aachen

Contact

WorkPhone

Phone: +49 241 80 49702

Fax Fax: +49 241 80 49709

Email: post_mod@eonerc.rwth-aachen.de

Website

Curriculum vitae

She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy in 1998 and 2002 respectively. In 2003 she joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Carolina (USC), USA, as Assistant Professor in the Power and Energy Research Group, and was tenured and promoted Associate Professor in 2008. During her time at USC she focused on the development of the on-board distribution system for the future all electric ship, sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research. To this aim, she supported, with studies on model level selection, the development of the Virtual Test Bed simulator, conceived for assisting offline and in real-time, the design and incremental prototyping of on board energy systems. She investigated innovative analysis tools, particularly polynomial chaos for including uncertainty analysis time domain simulation and design. From the control architecture standpoint, she introduced multi-agent systems for real-time control and monitoring of multi-converter power systems. In 2009 she joined the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems at the E.ON Research Center at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, where she is currently a Professor. Here she migrated her previous experience of onboard power system to terrestrial active distribution systems .

Her current research activity is in the area of monitoring and control of active electrical distribution grids and urban energy grids. In the research context of the Institute and the numerous European projects involving demonstration phases, Prof. Ponci’s scientific contributions could be fully developed, from the theoretical to the implementation, lab and field testing point of view. Her contributions include the design of a reference automation architecture for these grids, the development of algorithms for state estimation and energy management, the design and use of real time testing platform with Hardware-in-the-Loop technologies for the validation of algorithms and technologies in a near-real world setting. In the latter area, building on top of the expertise of the institute in joint power and communication co-simulation and emulation, Prof. Ponci has conceived and realized a Power Hardware-in-the-Loop platform for the testing of monitoring systems, complete in all parts, including instrumentation, algorithms, real world standards and protocols, in the framework of a field validated automation architecture. In energy management for buildings, she has contributed to the development of a multi-agent control system, which has been tested in a university building in Aachen .

She is part of an international network of collaborations, with particularly strong links in various European countries, USA, and China. She is involved with the Forschungscampus FEN, in the low voltage and medium voltage consortia. She has been a Senior member of IEEE since 2008 and Women in Engineering coordinator for Region 8. She is a member of IEEE Technical committees and task forces of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society and the Power and Energy Society. She has been a member of the Administration Committee of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society (2010-2016), Vice-President for Education, Conference Treasurer, Liaison with Women in Engineering, and Member of various committees. She has authored about 60 journal papers, 120 conference papers, some book chapters and has served as editor for one book.

Selected recent projects

• HEU BeFLEX Boosting Engagement to increase FLEXibility, 2022-2026
• HEU FLOW Flexible energy systems Leveraging the Optimal integration of EVs deployment Wave, 2022-2026
• HEU IntNET, Interoperability Network for the Energy Transition, 2022-2025
• EFRE.NRW and EU BRILLIANT: Blockchain based secure, reliable & resilient operation of critical infrastructure 2020-2022
• H2020 HYPERRIDE: HYbrid Provision of Energy based on Reliabilty and Resiliancy via Integration of Dc Equipment, 2020-2024
• H2020 EU SOGNO 2018-2020
• H2020 EU ADMS 2016-2018
• H2020 EU FLEXMETER 2015-2018
• H2020 EU IN2RAIL 2015-2018
• FP7 EU MERLIN 2012-2015
• FP7 EU IDE4L 2013-2016
• Uncertainty-based, Self-configuring Simulation for Design Support (summary final report)”

Publications