Demonstration of a Multi-Agent-based control system for active electric power distribution grids

Abstract

The rapidly growing number of distributed energy resources and other kinds of active electric grid components, the limitations of the present electric grid infrastructure and the increased complexity of the networks that comes along with these challenges require new sophisticated control methods for future electric distribution grids. To cope with these challenges a control design is necessary that offers autonomous operation and scalability. This contribution shows the results of the first implementation of a Multi-Agent-System-based Smart Grid control system approach in a real laboratory environment. A so-called islanding case is considered where the laboratory grid equipment gets separated from the utility grid and reconnected again. The agents of the developed control system conduct their assigned equipment to react to the changed situation appropriately, hence demonstrating the control system's applicability on a small-scale electric grid configuration.

The Application of Ontologies in Multi-Agent Systems in the Energy Sector: A Scoping Review

“…MAS is a decentralized scheme that utilizes distributed controllers for energy management and optimization, and it is an alternative approach for smart system optimizers (SSOs) implementation within a typically integrated energy system (IESs) [22]. MAS is an obvious and promising choice for the smart grid control system because MASs can overcome the threat of SPOFs (single-point-of-failure) due to their distributed characteristic [23]. Meanwhile, Considering the agent properties, the variety of components used in power transformer and the huge amounts of data involved, MAS provides the best possible choice for the purpose of monitoring, automating, controlling and diagnosing the power transformer components [24].…”

“…In a MAS of the energy system, agents can represent market players, network components, or part of/a whole system [9]. Therefore, the multi-agent architecture of energy and power systems is designed for dealing with the system complexity [9,23]. Meanwhile, multi-agent simulations allow investigating the statics and changes of the physical systems, electricity market and market players' behaviors.…”

“…Protege is well established and used by a large user community. For instance, Protege is used in the selected literature [23,24,48,50].…”

A Decentralized Solution for Transmission Expansion Planning: Getting Inspiration from Nature

“…The literature includes some examples of this type of study [18,19]. Among these recent applications, some of them study specific aspects such as the dispatching of wind energy [20], the modeling of demand elasticity through individual consumers [21,22], distributed generation [23], smart grids [24][25][26][27] or micro grids [28][29][30].…”

“…For these reasons, ABMs have been used in the context of reliability analyses, post-fault diagnosis (investigating the causes of a failure), or power system restoration [31,33,34]. Other applications deal with control and automation [23,25,26,28,30,[35][36][37]. In addition, ABMs have been used as an optimization tool to calculate power flows [27] or the economic dispatch of generation units [38].…”