Coordination of a Society of Agents for Automatic Distribution System Restoration: Toward a Smart Grid

Establishing a smart power grid utilizing advanced agent information technology has raised much attention recently. In this paper we propose a method that is based on coordination and negotiation among a set of distributed local power committees who could together reach a consensus of “global” optimal power restoration solution in cope with local power failures after a fault is detected in a power grid. The optimality criteria can be specified by a human power manager in terms of actual operation costs such as the minimum number of switch actions. We show how local distributed agent committees whose members are essentially switch agents and power generator agents are connected locally as neighbors and can find a global optimal solution to the power restoration problem by localizing their decisions in the local committee and by communicating and negotiating via neighbors of their committee members.