Intelligent monitoring and control architecture for future electrical power systems

Electrical power systems often operate with significantly larger numbers of small-scale highly dispersed generation units. The need to mange, operate, monitor and control the performance of these systems has increased the requirements of finding new control venues that facilitate achieving a reliable automation that makes disturbance monitoring, classifications and measurements a common practice for utilities. In order to operate such power systems securely and efficiently it will be necessary to monitor and control output levels and scheduling when connecting such generation to a power system especially when it is typically embedded at the distribution level. Traditional monitoring and control technology that is currently employed at the transmission level is highly centralized and not scalable to include such significant increases in distributed and embedded generation. This paper presents an ongoing research work that defines an agent-based distribution architecture that supports ad hoc and automated system configurations emphasizing the strategies for achieving, locating and isolating faults without degrading the quality of services. The overall network is viewed as a cooperative distributed electric power system (CDEPS) and modelled as distributed intelligent agents that work together to achieve a common global goal in an ambient setting. The architecture provides organization interaction protocols that manage, control and restore power to the faulty points within a network of cooperative distributed power systems. A formal specification of the coordination protocols is represented using an Input / Output Automata model.