Application of multi-agents to power distribution systems

The electric power system has become a very complicated network at present because of re-structuring and the penetration of distributed energy resources. In addition, due to increasing demand for power, issues such as transmission congestion have made the power system stressed. A single fault can lead to massive cascading effects, affecting the power supply and power quality. An overall solution for these issues can be obtained by a new artificial intelligent mechanism called the multi-agent system. A multi-agent system is a collection of agents, which senses the environmental changes and acts diligently on the environment in order to achieve its objectives. Due to the increasing speed and decreasing cost in communication and computation of complex matrices, multi-agent system promise to be a viable solution for today\u27s intrinsic network problems.;A multi-agent system model for fault detection and reconfiguration is presented in this thesis. These models are developed based on graph theory and mathematical programming. A mathematical model is developed to specify the objective function and the constraints.;The multi-agent models are simulated in Java Agent Development Framework and MatlabRTM and are applied to the power system model designed in the commercial software, Distributed Engineering Workstation(c) . The circuit that is used to model the power distribution system is the Circuit of the Future, developed by Southern California Edison.;The multi-agent system model can precisely detect the fault location and according to the type of fault, it reconfigures the system to supply as much load as possible by satisfying the power balance and line capacity constraints. The model is also capable of handling the assignment of load priorities.;All possible fault cases were tested and a few critical test scenarios are presented in this thesis. The results obtained were promising and were as expected