Distributed control agents approach to energy management in electric shipboard power system

The automatic reconfiguration of electric shipboard power systems is an important step toward improved fight-through and self-healing capabilities of naval warships. The improvements are envisioned by redesigning the electric power system and its controls. This paper presents a new scheme for an energy management system in the form of distributed control agents. The control agents' task is to ensure supply of the various load demands while taking into consideration system constraints and load priorities. A graph theoretic self-stabilizing maximum flow algorithm for the implementation of the agents' strategies has been developed to find a global solution using local information and a minimum amount of communication. A case study using the distributed agents within a multilayer system architecture to function as energy management system is presented