When a light goes out in your house, troubleshooting is simple. It’s either the bulb or the breaker box.
But when an error occurs in a system as vast as a power grid for a region with a population of 10 million, experts need to rely on sensors to determine when and where an error has occurred.
Identifying the minimum number of sensors needed to determine when an error has occurred at a specific location is the work of graph theorists including Kirsti Kuenzel, Trinity College associate professor of mathematics. Kuenzel recently received a three-year American Mathematical Society Simons Research Enhancement Grant to support her international work in this area.
“I am part of a small group of graph theorists that study product graphs, which are interesting in that they exhibit algebraic properties, yet have significant applications in modeling networks such as power grids,” said Kuenzel.
The utility of graph theory comes from its versatility because a graph is simply a set of vertices and edges between those vertices to help model a situation, said Kuenzel.
Applying graph theory to situations may provide fault detection in large systems and, for the customer, get the lights back on sooner.
