Ferdinanda Ponci

Prof. Ferdinanda Ponci received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2002. In 2003 she joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Carolina as an Assistant Professor. In 2008 she was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. In 2009 she joined the E.ON Energy Research Center - Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems at RWTH Aachen University as Chief Engineer and Lecturer, and she has been an APL Professor at the same institution since 2010.

She is a Senior Member of IEEE, a Member of the Administration Committee of the Power Electronics Society and of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society. She is the Liaison of the Power Electronics Society with the IEEE WIE.

Her research activity has been sponsored by Industry and by Government Agencies, the US Office of Naval Research in particular.

Her research activity is focused on agent based applications in monitoring and energy management, distributed state estimation, and modeling and simulation of uncertain systems.

Prof. Ponci’s research work in agent based control is currently focused on the coordination of multi-functional, multi-converter systems. This activity aims on one hand at exploiting the installed conversion power at best using it for ancillary features such as power quality compensation, on the other hand it aims at enabling a full plug&play operation. This research is done in collaboration with Dr. Herb Ginn at Mississippi State University.

In her work towards distributing intelligence and functionalities in power electronic systems, Prof. Ponci has contributed to develop a method for distributed dynamic state estimation, with a selection of data to be exchanged by the area to minimize computational effort and the communication cost.

In an environment of distributed monitoring and control functions, the detection and identification of the failure of a sensor and the reconstruction of the missing data are particularly critical. To these aims Prof. Ponci has contributed with the application of Polynomial Chaos Theory.

Prof. Ponci’s research in modeling and simulation is aimed at creating an effective support of design based on the concept that the model is the specification. For this purpose she is developing a new concept of self-adjusting simulation schematic where multi-level models are capable of autonomously select their optimal active level for the design objective for which the simulation is used.