Software tools for real-time simulation and control

The objective of this thesis is to design and simulate a multi-agent based energy management system for a shipboard power system in hard real-time environment. The automatic reconfiguration of shipboard power systems is essential to improve survivability. Multi-agent technology is used in designing the reconfigurable energy management system using a self-stabilizing maximum flow algorithm. The agent based energy management system is designed in a Matlab/Simulink environment. Reconfiguration is performed for several situations including start-up, loss of an agent, limited available power, and distribution to priority ranked loads. The number of steps taken to reach the global solution and the time taken are very promising. With the growing importance of timing accuracy in simulating control systems during design and development, there is an increased need for these simulations to run in a real-time environment. This research further focuses on software tools that support hard real-time environment to run real-time simulations. A detailed survey has been conducted on freely available real-time operating systems and other software tools to setup a desktop PC supporting real-time environment. Matlab/Simulink/RTW-RTAI was selected as real-time computer aided control design software for demonstrating real-time simulation of agent based energy management system. The timing accuracy of these simulations has been verified successfully