Development of a Multi Agent system for voltage and outage monitoring

Abstract

An operational analysis of agent based voltage and outage monitoring system for power distribution network would be presented in this paper. Sri Lankan distribution network has been upgraded recently with some of the new technological features such as automatic meter reading, remote breaker operations etc. But most important activities in the distribution system such as fault identifications, voltage monitoring and network reconfiguration are still carried out using the conventional methods. Recently different types of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are established in the distribution utilities to maintain easy monitoring system and reporting system. The reporting system is comprised with the agent based report generation for power quality measurement indexes. Individual index values of each consumers and the whole area network index can be monitored through this system. Scalability and the flexibility of the monitoring system can be improved with the proposed Multi Agent system. Five major agents namely Database Agent, Meter Agent, Breaker Agent, Area network Agent and Reporting Agent are established in the system. A case study has been done to verify the development with six different data sets. Four different types of voltage failures are identified as high voltage, low voltage, branch failures and individual meter faults. The agent based four scenarios were compared with conventional method. The voltage quality measurements of the end user can be recognized through the proposed monitoring system.