Dr. Amin has a vision for the future of energy infrastructure in North America – smarter, sustainable, more resilient and secure. We’ve learned a great deal in the last 15 years about complex “lifeline” infrastructures – not just powerlines, but anything that absolutely, positively needs to survive failure.

From the PopTech Blog:

Amin’s work went on to studying intelligent transport and highway systems. This work was moved dramatically forwards by EPRI – the Electric Power Research Institute – which involved 240 graduate students and 108 professors who jointly studied complex interactive networks. The goal was to build networks that were secure, robust and self-healing.

“The mother of smart grids is the self-healing grid.” These systems have a normal, undisturbed state, an alert model that senses precursors to an emergency state, and then attempts to restore from these aggravated states to the normal ones. The key is to build systems that are simple and smart, that focus on security, reliability, robustness, efficiency, and security. Security became even more important in the wake of 9/11, when the focus became on dynamic risk assessment, analyzing threats to these infrastructures.

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