Abstract:
Legacy electrical infrastructure is failing to provide the reliability and the resiliency towards
faults expected by the modern energy intensive society. Implementation of smarter
microgrids, are proving to be part of the solution for this. Development of such systems
requires distributed intelligence capabilities absent in legacy control systems. This research
focuses on proposing a dual layered, multi agent based control system for distributed control
of a microgrid aimed at intentional islanding and dynamic load management. The
architecture consists of two layers; primary strategic level layer and secondary execution
level layer. The Control agent in the primary, or the strategic level, is capable of supervising
the secondary layer agents. The proposed Multi Agent System (MAS) controller provides
islanding capabilities to a microgrid during disturbances in the main utility grid. During
islanded operation, the MAS is able to maintain the supply to the most critical local loads. If
the priority levels of the loads change after loads are shed, the MAS is able to reassign power
to the revised most critical load/s. The proposed multi agent based control architecture is
developed using the JADE platform and it is used to control a microgrid simulated in
MATLAB/SIMULINK. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method,
investigations are carried out for islanding and dynamic load management scenarios
simulated on the test network. The results of these studies show the capability of developing
a reliable control mechanism for islanding operation of microgrids based on the proposed
concept.
