Prof. Osama A. Mohammed
NAI Fellow, IEEE Fellow, ACES Fellow Distinguished Professor & Associate Dean of Research
Director, Energy Systems Research Laboratory
Florida International University
Miami, Florida USA
Dr. Osama A. Mohammed is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Associate Dean of Research at the College of Engineering and Computing, Florida International University. He has researched various topics in computational electromagnetics, power and energy systems, design optimization, and physics-based modeling in electric drive systems, power electronics, and other low-frequency environments. He is world-renowned for his contributions in these areas. He currently has active research projects from several federal agencies in these areas. In addition, he has also performed research in power system operation, smart grid distributed control and interoperability, cyber-physical systems, and co-design of cyber and physical components for future energy systems and industrial applications. He has published more than 850 articles in refereed journals and other IEEE refereed international conference records. Professor Mohammed holds 17 patents in addition to several others filed. His publications are highly cited, and his presentations are frequently invited, at research, academic and industrial organizations, and conferences worldwide. He also authored a book and several book chapters. Dr. Mohammed is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Fellow of the Applied Computational Electromagnetic Society. He received the IEEE Power and Energy Society Cyril Veinott Electromechanical Energy Conversion Award, the 2012 Outstanding Research Award from Florida International University, the 2017 outstanding doctoral mentor, and the university distinguished Professor honors in 2018
Keynote Speech: Operational Security and Control Challenges in Smart Energy Systems
Abstract: The development of innovative cybersecurity technologies, tools, and methodologies that advance the energy system’s ability to survive cyber-attacks and incidents while sustaining critical functions, is needed for the secure operation of utilities, industrial systems, smart homes, and transportation systems. It is essential to verify and validate the ability of the developed solutions and methodologies so that they can be used effectively in practice. Developing solutions to mitigate cyber vulnerabilities throughout the energy delivery system is essential to protect hardware assets. It will also make systems less susceptible to cyber threats and provide reliable delivery of electricity if a cyber incident occurs.
This talk will describe how the developed solution can protect the power grid, industrial systems, smart homes, and transportation systems and infrastructures from cyber-attacks and build cybersecurity protection into emerging power grid components and customer-based services. This includes microgrid and demand-side management components and protects the network (substations and productivity lines) and data infrastructure to increase the resilience of the energy delivery systems against cyber-attacks.
The development of secure operation and cybersecurity capabilities in energy systems should span over multiple strategies; in the near term, midterm, and long term. Continuous security state monitoring across cyber-physical domains is the goal in the near term. The development of continually defending interoperable components that continue operating in degraded conditions is required in the midterm. Developing methodologies to quickly mitigate cyber incidents to return to normal operations is necessary for all system components in the long term. We will discuss R&D efforts in these research areas centered on developing operational frameworks related to communication and interoperability, control, and protection in various platforms, including smart homes and electric vehicles.
One of the emerging research areas is the scalable cloud-based Multi-Agent System to control large-scale penetration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and their infrastructure into the power grid. This is a system that can survive cyber-attacks while sustaining critical functions. This framework’s network will be assessed by applying contingencies and identifying the resulting real-time detection signatures. As a result, protective measures can be taken to address the dynamic threats in the foreseen grid-integrated EV parks where the developed system will have an automated response to a cyber-attack.
In distributed energy management systems, the protection system must be adaptive. It is assisted by communication networks to react to dynamic changes in the microgrid configurations. This presentation will also describe a newly developed protection scheme with extensive communication for power networks to monitor the microgrid during these dynamic changes. The robustness and availability of the communication infrastructure are required for the success of protection measures.