A Mobile Agent for Measurements in Distributed Power Electronic Systems

This paper introduces the use of a mobile agent (MA) for the purpose of power quality assessment in systems with distributed control. The MA introduced here leverages on the agent-based distributed control of the electrical loads of power electronic distribution systems. While the stationary agents autonomously control local loads and are capable of negotiations for reconfiguration purposes, they have to rely on external resources for certain types of more-sophisticated evaluations of the operating condition, such as the power quality impact of each load. The authors had already considered two other solutions based on stationary agents: The first option implied the use of one stationary monitoring agent that is capable of providing this information, and the second option implied the embedding of additional algorithms in the load agents. In this paper, a new approach based on an MA is investigated. The advantage of such solution primarily consists of its flexibility and the fact that the MA can easily be redeployed to serve various other purposes and exploit the distributed computational capability available in the systems under consideration.