Application of multi-agents for fault detection and reconfiguration of power distribution systems

The electric power system has become a very complicated network at present because of re-structuring and the penetration of distributed generation and storage. A single fault can lead to massive cascading effects affecting power supply and power quality. An overall systematic solution for these issues could be obtained by an artificial intelligent mechanism called the multi-agent system. This paper presents a multi-agent system model for fault detection and reconfiguration based on graph theory and mathematical programming. The multi-agent models are simulated in Java Agent Development Framework and Matlab^reg and are applied to a power system model designed in the commercial software, the Distributed Engineering Workstation^copy. The circuit that is used to model the power distribution system is a simplified model of the Circuit of the Future, developed by Southern California Edison. Possible fault cases were tested and a few critical test scenarios are presented in this paper. The results obtained were promising and were as expected.