Real-time implementation of an intelligent algorithm for electric ship power system reconfiguration

The naval electric ship is often subject to severe damages under battle conditions. The damages or faults might even affect the generators and as a result, critical loads might suffer from power deficiency which may lead to an eventual collapse of rest of the system. In order to serve the critical loads and maintain a proper power balance without excessive generation, the ship power system requires a fast reconfiguration of the remaining system under fault conditions. A fast intelligent algorithm using the small population based particle swarm optimization (SPPSO) for dynamic reconfiguration of the available generators and loads when a fault in the ship power system is detected is presented in this paper. SPPSO is a variant of PSO which operates with fewer particles and a regeneration concept, where new potential solutions are generated every few iterations. This concept of regeneration makes the algorithm fast and enhances its exploration capability to a large extent. The strength of the proposed reconfiguration strategy is first illustrated with Matlab results and then with a real-time implementation on a real time digital simulator and a digital signal processor.