A multi‐agent approach to unit commitment

Abstract

AbstractThis paper proposes a multiagent system to power system unit commitment problems. Multiagent is a new paradigm for developing software applications. Coordinating the behavior of autonomous agents is a key issue in agent‐oriented programming techniques today. Recently, agents are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively small systems such as E‐mail filters to large, open, complex systems such as air traffic control. Though some agent frameworks have been proposed in the power system field, the number of studies is limited.In this paper, we developed a power system unit commitment application by multiagent architecture. Our multiagent system has the following characteristics: (1) The system consists of a single facilitator agent, two mobile agents, and one or more generator agents which are elements of power system network. (2) The facilitator agent is developed to act as a manager for the process by using the singleton design pattern. The mobile agents migrate to generator‐agents to increase or decrease their power generations. The generator agents have their operational data. (3) Message object is developed to communicate between the agents using KQML‐like object. The proposed approach is applied to a simple model system, and the results show that the multiagent system is an efficient decentralized approach for solving power system unit commitment problems. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 141(2): 41–47, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/eej.10057