A Survey of AI in System of Systems With a Focus on Power Electronic Systems—Part I: Design and Control

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become essential in dealing with the growing complexities of modern power electronic systems (PESs). In the context of Industries 4.0, 5.0, and especially 6.0, which are considered as ultra-large-scale systems, AI is becoming essential in addressing the multidimensional challenges of PES design, energy management, and control in complex interconnected systems. This part I of our two-part survey provides a comprehensive overview of AI techniques applied to the design and control stages across the lifecycle of PES. In this survey, we consider an energy conversion chain incorporating energy sources, converters, controllers, sensors, and loads as a complex or a large system with several subsystems by integrating the AI part for several objectives among others: design, control, optimization, maintenance, fault detection, etc. Our unique contributions include: first, a complete lifecycle-oriented perspective for power electronics systems, second, structured tabular summaries emphasizing experimental validation versus simulation-only studies, third, focus on design automation and AI-integrated converter control, and fourth, identification of research gaps in hardware implementation and model interpretability. This survey also identifies open challenges and offers forward-looking insights into design automation, and AI-integrated converter control for smart grids, electric vehicles, and power systems. This article aims to serve as a roadmap for both researchers and engineers seeking to adopt AI in next-generation power electronics. Part II of this survey will focus on the maintenance and forecasting phases of the lifecycle of PES.