Multi-agent system design principles for resilient operation of future power systems

Recently, the academic and industrial literature has coalesced around an enhanced vision of the electric power grid that is intelligent, responsive, dynamic, adaptive and flexible. One particularly emphasized “smart-grid” property is that of resilience where healthy regions of the grid continue to operate while disrupted and perturbed regions bring themselves back to normal operation. Multi-agent systems have recently been proposed as a key enabling technology for such a resilient control scheme. While the power system literature has often addressed multi-agent systems, many of these works did not have resilience as the central design intention. This paper now has a two-fold purpose. First, it seeks to identify a set of multi-agent system design principles for resilient coordination and control of future power systems. To that end, it draws upon an axiomatic design for large flexible engineering systems model which was recently used in the development of resilience measures. From this quantitative model, a set of design principles are easily distilled. Second, the paper assesses the adherence of existing multi-agent system implementations with respect to these design principles. The paper concludes that while many multi-agent systems have been developed for power grids, they have been primarily intended as the decentralization of a particular decision-making/control algorithm. Thus many of the works make only limited contributions to power grid resilience.