I am looking for students to join my research lab. Please read on if you are interested.




Prospective B. Tech students:

I am looking for ethusiastic undergraduate students for a research project on "smart appliances for the smart power grid". The goal is to prototype smart water heaters for deployment in the IIT campus to make electricity supply in the IIT-G campus more reliable, resilient, and cheaper. See these slides for a presentation on the envisoned system. The project will involve programming Arduino microprocessors, building small electronic circuits, and Python programming. Primary requirement is enthusiasm and conscientiousness. Technical skills can be acquired on the job. For those who make good progress the project can be expanded to a paid job. If interested, please email me with a resume and and an unofficial transcript.


Prospective M. Tech and Ph.D. students:



A few research project topics for potential M. Tech and Ph.D. theses are listed below. The scope of work will be different depending on M.Tech. or Ph.D., but these topics contain many sub-topics of varying level of complexity, so they have enough potential for both M.Tech. and Ph.D. students. Many more are possible depending on your interest and degree of overlap with the lab's vision:
  1. Coordinated control of smart agents (air conditioners, EVs, etc.) to provide ancillary services to the power grid, to ameliorate the effect of intermittent generation from solar and wind

    Related literature (see my Google Scholar page for complete references):

    1. Austin Coffman and Ana Busic and Prabir Barooah, "Virtual Energy Storage from TCLs using QoS preserving local randomized control", 5th ACM International Conference on Systems for Built Environments (BuildSys), pp. 10, November, 2018.

    2. A Coffman, NJ Cammardella, P Barooah, SP Meyn, "Aggregate flexibility capacity of TCLs with cycling constraints", IEEE Transactions on Power Systems,2022.

    3. Austin Coffman and Ana Busic and Prabir Barooah, "A study of virtual energy storage from thermostatically controlled loads under time-varying weather conditions", International High Performance Buildings Conference, 2018.

  2. Modeling and control of commercial air conditioning systems for energy efficiency and demand response

    Related literature (see my Google Scholar page for complete references):

    1. Tingting Zeng, Jonathan Brooks, and Prabir Barooah, "Simultaneous identification of linear building dynamic model and disturbance using sparsity-promoting optimization", Automatica , vol. 129, 109631, 2021.

    2. Z Guo, AR Coffman, J Munk, P Im, T Kuruganti, P Barooah "Aggregation and data driven identification of building thermal dynamic model and unmeasured disturbance", Energy and Buildings, vol 231, 110500, 2021.

    3. Z Guo, AR Coffman, P Barooah, "Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Control of a District Cooling Energy Plant", arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.07500 , 2022.

    4. NS Raman, K Devaprasad, B Chen, HA Ingley, P Barooah, "Model predictive control for energy-efficient HVAC operation with humidity and latent heat considerations", Applied Energy, vol. 279, 115765, 2020.

  3. Development of wireless environmental monitoring networks for energy and disaster management (Only for M.Tech)

    4. Related literature: see this paper draft.
Main requirements for both M.Tech. and Ph.D. students are (i) enthusiasm, (ii) curiosity, and (iii) conscientiousness. As for technical skills, many of these research projects lie at the intersection of control and power systems. You don't need to be an expert in either to get started. But you do need a background in linear algebra (absolutely essential) and optimization (essential, but can be acquired "on the job"). So if you are interested in working with me, you need to take courses on these two topics. Specifically, I advise you to take EE EE 556 (Linear Algebra) and/or EE 590 (Linear Algebra and Optimization). Even the foundation of EE 550 (Linear Systems Theory) is linear algebra so that course may help as well.

For potential Ph.D. students : I expect you to read a couple of my recent papers relevant to the topic and provide a critique of those papers when you discuss your research interest with me. In particular, tell me what you think is wrong with those papers.

For current lab members

Coming soon...