Rapid decarbonisation and large-scale deployment of inverter-based renewables are turning power systems into low-inertia, weakly meshed grids where stability can no longer be guaranteed by a few synchronous machines. At the same time, Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as storage, electric vehicles, rooftop PV, and flexible loads are proliferating in distribution networks, creating substantial but fragmented flexibility. Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) aggregate these DERs into controllable portfolios, yet ancillary services are still often treated as static reserve capacities or power set-points, neglecting the dynamic behaviour required for Fast Frequency Response (FFR), inertia emulation, and other short-timescale services. This thesis, therefore, adopts the concept of Dynamic Virtual Power Plants (DVPPs), which explicitly model internal device dynamics. The thesis develops a coordination framework and associated operation models that enable aggregated DERs to provide reliable dynamic ancillary services under scalability constraints, limited disclosure of local information, and behavioural considerations. It is organised around three themes: modelling DVPP operation for dynamic services, designing distributed and scalable solution methods, and integrating prosumer motivation into ancillary-service provision.

Ground fault detection in inverter-based microgrid (IBM) systems is challenging, particularly in a real-time setting, as the fault current deviates slightly from the nominal value. This difficulty is reinforced when there are partially decoupled disturbances and modeling uncertainties. The conventional solution of installing more relays to obtain additional measurements is costly and also increases the complexity of the system. In this brief, we propose a data-assisted diagnosis scheme based on an optimization-based fault detection filter with the output current as the only measurement. Modeling the microgrid dynamics and the diagnosis filter, we formulate the filter design as a quadratic programming (QP) problem that accounts for decoupling partial disturbances, robustness to nondecoupled disturbances and modeling uncertainties by training with data, and ensuring fault sensitivity simultaneously. To ease the computational effort, we also provide an approximate but analytical solution to this QP. Additionally, we use classical statistical results to provide a thresholding mechanism that enjoys probabilistic false-alarm guarantees. Finally, we implement the IBM system with Simulink and real-time digital simulator (RTDS) to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through simulations.

This letter studies the problem of coordinating aggregators in the power system to provide fast frequency response as dynamic ancillary services. We approach the problem from the perspective of suboptimal H _∞ control, and propose an efficient and tractable formulation. We further develop a distributed solution method for the investigated problem, which enables aggregator agents to learn their optimal provisions in an adaptive way. More precisely, we reformulate the original problem into a state-based potential game, where the agents interact with each other towards our designed Nash equilibrium. The proposed game-theoretic learning approach decouples the coupling Linear Matrix Inequality constraint, guarantees the convergence to the equilibrium which is close enough to the original optimum. The learning process is also robust to the changes in communication graphs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach with a case study on a 3-aggregator system.

Synthetic networks aim at generating realistic projections of real-world networks while concealing the actual system information. This paper proposes a scalable and effective approach based on graph neural networks (GNN) to generate synthetic topologies of Cyber-Physical power Systems (CPS) with realistic network feature distribution. In order to comprehensively capture the characteristics of real CPS networks, we propose a generative model, namely Graph-CPS, based on graph variational autoencoder and graph recurrent neural networks. The method hides the sensitive topological information while maintaining the similar feature distribution of the real networks. We used multiple power and communication networks to prove and assess the effectiveness of the proposed method with experimental results.

Due to the increasing system stability issues caused by the technological revolutions of power system equipment, the assessment of the dynamic security of the systems for changing operating conditions (OCs) is nowadays crucial. To address the computational time problem of conventional dynamic security assessment tools, many machine learning (ML) approaches have been proposed and well-studied in this context. However, these learned models only rely on data, and thus miss resourceful information offered by the physical system. To this end, this paper focuses on combining the power system dynamical model together with the conventional ML. Going beyond the classic Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), this paper proposes Selected Physics Informed Neural Networks (SPINNs) to predict the system dynamics for varying OCs. A two-level structure of feed-forward NNs is proposed, where the first NN predicts the generator bus rotor angles (system states) and the second NN learns to adapt to varying OCs. We show a case study on an IEEE-9 bus system that considering selected physics in model training reduces the amount of needed training data. Moreover, the trained model effectively predicted long-term dynamics that were beyond the time scale of the collected training dataset (extrapolation).