Decentralized Voltage Control of Power Systems Using Multi-agent Systems

A comprehensive scheme based on decentralized control, partitioning, multi-agent systems, and fuzzy logic is presented in this paper for the voltage control of power systems. In our proposed smart self-healing method, two types of control agents are defined, namely master and local, which are applied in two steps. In the first step, the power system returns to the normal state after fault occurrence. Immediately after a fault detection in a power system, the system is divided into three subsystems using spectral graph partitioning. Partitioning is conducted based on reactive power flow in transmission lines. For each subsystem, a local control agent and a performance index (PI) are defined. Whenever the PI of a subsystem exceeds its threshold limit, the local control agent uses the Sugeno fuzzy system to intelligently select and apply control actions. In the second step as performed by the master control agent, the power system is transformed to an optimal state by solving the optimization problem. Simulations on a 39-bus New England reveal the effective performance of the proposed method.