Distributed control agents approach to energy management in electric shipboard power system

The automatic reconfiguration of electric shipboard power systems is an important step toward improved fight-through and self-healing capabilities of naval warships. The improvements are envisioned by redesigning the electric power system and its controls. This paper presents a new scheme for an energy management system in the form of distributed control agents. The control agents´ task is to ensure supply of the various load demands while taking into consideration system constraints and load priorities. A graph theoretic self-stabilizing maximum flow algorithm for the implementation of the agents´ strategies has been developed to find a global solution using local information and a minimum amount of communication. A case study using the distributed agents within a multilayer system architecture to function as energy management system is presented