Design of a multi-agent system for shipboard power systems restoration

Service restoration during a fault in ship electric power systems due to external forces or internal faults is an important task for ship power systems design. To enhance the system reliability, an intelligent distributed multi-agent system (MAS) concept is utilized in this paper and a methodology for design of a MCS for ship power systems restoration is proposed. When a fault in the system is detected and isolated, an appropriate restoration plan is derived and performed by power electronic building blocks (PEBBs) used in the MAS through feeder reconfiguration according to the system emergency operation procedure. To ensure the performance of proposed method, a discrete event simulation technique is used to evaluate the data transfer time delays among different agents in the MAS for different fault conditions in the system. A practical ship electric power system is selected for computer simulation to explore the benefit of MAS to ship power restoration. Test results have shown that with the MAS, the restoration procedure can be completed in a shorter time than the traditional restoration method and therefore, the system reliability is enhanced.