Coordinating a society of switch agents for power distribution service restoration in a smart grid

In this paper, we use advanced multi-agent technologies to establish a smart power grid to solve the power distribution restoration problems. Specifically, we modeled switches in the power distribution systems as intelligent agents who can communicate and coordinate together to find a global optimal solution to the power distribution service restoration problems. We modeled the society of intelligent switch agents as local power committees in a distribution system and propose a coordination method for the distributed local power committees so that they could reach a consensus among many proposed service restoration solutions after faults are detected in the distribution feeders. We show how the local switch agent committees find the global optimal restoration solution to all local power demand issues through communicating and propagating the power demand issues, proposing local candidate solutions and combine issues and solutions and finally finding solution by constraint satisfaction. We also compare our multiagent approach to the traditional methods and benchmark problems from power restoration research literatures and show satisfactory performance results.