Control of distributed generator and smart grid using multi-agent system

The electric power system is an enabling infrastructure that supports the operation of other critical infrastructures and thus the economic well being of the nation. It is therefore very important to design a smart grid for resiliency and autonomous re-configurability in the electric power grid. For the operation of any power system, its control architecture consisting of hardware and software protocols is very essential for exchanging system status and control signals. This is accomplished by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. Current trends to control and monitor the operation of electric power systems are however moving towards the use of an automated agent technology using a multi-agent system which replaces SCADA system. The objective of this paper is to design and model a multiagent system which consists of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) agent, Data Base agent, Control agent and User agent. DER agent is modeled using MATLAB/SIMULINK. The simulation results presented in this paper show the seamless transition from grid connected to an island mode when upstream outages are detected. This denotes the capability of a multi-agent system as a technology for managing the microgrid operation.