Balancing Decentralization for Restoration in Power Distribution Systems With Agents

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 10; pp. 77993 - 78001
• Main Authors: Venturini, Lucas F., Baracy, Yago L., Silva, Rodrigo V. P. C., De Freitas, Bruna K., Dos Santos, Erika P., Branco, Nilton O., Monteiro, Marcos E. P., Hubner, Jomi F., Issicaba, Diego
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Costs; Decentralized power restoration; Decision making; Electric power distribution; Electronic devices; multi-agent systems; Multiagent systems; Peer-to-peer computing; Power distribution; Power management; Relays; Restoration; self-healing grids; Switches; Voltage
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3192847

Power distribution systems are subject to faults that may cause service interruptions. The outage impact can be attenuated by restoration procedures, aiming to reconfigure the grid until faulted components are repaired. Proposals for these procedures are usually either fully centralized or fully decentralized. In this paper, a hybrid approach (partially decentralized) for the restoration problem based on a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed and evaluated. Results show that caution must be taken when specifying the level of decentralization achieved by agent based procedures devoted to system restoration, especially if low power devices are utilized to achieve agent communication.