Integrating intermittent distributed generation, distributed storage systems, electric vehicles, and flexible loads will present security, stability, and power quality challenges in future smart grids. The amount of data to be processed to face these issues can overwhelm grid operation tools and conventional IT-based applications, limiting situational awareness and decision support. Decentralized and self-organizing technologies can help with that problem. In a self-organizing system, information processing is based on local interactions of its elementary parts (dynamic agents), enabling the cooperative solution of complex decision-making problems by only requiring local information exchange without needing a fusion center for data collection and processing.

• Chapter 1: Emerging needs and open problems in smart grids operation
• Chapter 2: Achieving consensus in cooperative and self-organising sensors networks
• Chapter 3: Self-Organizing Wide Area Measurement Systems
• Chapter 4: Decentralized Voltage Regulation by Self-Organizing Controllers Network
• Chapter 5: Decentralized Economic Dispatch of Distributed Generators
• Chapter 6: Decentralized Monitoring Estimation and Control of Smart Microgrids
• Chapter 7: A Decentralized Framework for Dynamic Thermal Rating Assessment of Overhead Lines