Emergency coordination and decision making over interconnected power systems

An interconnected transmission network of power system is composed of several subsystems which are jurisdictionally operated by different system operators and exhibit global changes instantaneously as a result of local decisions of any operator related to its own grid. The complexity of the coordination and decision making of power systems, an infrastructure which can be represented as a socio-technical system, demands investigations of applicable approaches to simulate and analyze the impacts of different coordination rules on the decision making and the performance of the system, especially under emergency. In this paper, a general framework for modeling the power transmission grids as a complex socio-technical system is proposed. Under the framework, multi-agent systems are employed to simulate the decision making of each system operator and the performance of the whole interconnected system due to their interaction. Different scenarios are designed to compare and analyze the impacts of coordination rules, mainly focusing on the policy for tie-line management and on the information revealed, on the outcomes of the decision making process and on the system performance in terms of transmission network feasibility (i.e. line flow, voltage profile, generator output) with reference to the subsystem and the whole interconnected network. The approach is applied to the IEEE-30 bus system to illustrate its application and effectiveness.