Dejan Sobajic

Dejan Sobajic, Ph.D., has over 40 years of experience in the areas of power system operations and planning, wholesale markets operations, control-center technology, operator training and IT design. Most recently, at NYISO, he was responsible for the coordination of investment and demonstration projects proposed by NYS utilities in response to the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. NYISO is a present recipient of the DOE Smart Grid Investment Grant.  At EPRI, his responsibilities included strategic planning and marketing of EPRI’s Power Delivery & Power Markets programs. He was also involved in extensive interactions with FERC, NERC, US DHS, US DOE, ETSO and the European Commission. Dr. Sobajic was responsible for key industry initiatives – including the Advanced market design, system-wide implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM) and its extensions for market data (CME), and the Reliability Initiative – an industry-led effort aimed at uncovering root causes of reliability problems of the North American transmission grid. Dr. Sobajic has been invited to provide testimony to the US Congress and FERC. In 1988 he pioneered the use of neural net technology in the field of power system engineering. He designed the unsupervised/supervised learning and supervised clustering neural net paradigms.  In 1990 he designed the first neural net controller for load-frequency regulation using the principle of learning control. He developed and delivered the first tutorial on “Neural Net Applications for the Electric Power Industry”, at FURNAS in Rio de Janeiro in 1989. Dr. Sobajic has edited the first textbook on the subject of use of neurocomputing in power system engineering entitled “Neural Network Computing for the Electric Power Industry”(1993). He is the author/co-author of over 100 technical papers in power system analysis, stability, system operation and markets, control and computational intelligence. He can communicate in English, Russian, German and Serbian language.

Areas of Expertise

  • SCADA/EMS design and real time system applications development
  • Power system modeling, stability and control
  • Intelligent systems applications in industry

Experience and Background

  • 40 years of utility industry experience
  • 14 years of academic experience
  • President and CEO, Grid Engineering LLC (since 2005)
  • Consulting Associate Professor at Stanford University (1994-1997)

Accomplishments and Industry Recognition

  • Chairman, ISC, International Workshop on Electric Power Control Centers – EPCC (www.epcc-workshop.net) (since 2005)
  • Member, Editorial Advisory Board, International Journal of Engineering Intelligent Systems for Electrical Engineering and Communication (1989)
  • Founding Member, IEEE Task Force on Applications of ANN to Power Systems (1989)
  • Founding Member, CIGRE Task Force 38.06.06 on Application of ANN to Power Systems (1989)
  • Founding Member, Technical Steering Committee, ISAP (1989)
  • CIGRE (since 1989) and IEEE Member (since 1974)

Education

  • Ph.D., Systems Engineering, Intelligent Power Systems, 1988
  • M.Sc., Electrical Engineering, Power Systems Control, 1976
  • Dipl. Eng., Electrical Engineering, Power Systems Control, 1972