A Multi-Agent Approach to Unit Commitment
Takeshi Nagata, Masumi Ohno, Hiroshi M. Sasaki, Hideki Fujita · IEEJ Transactions on Electronics Information and Systems · 2001
This paper proposes a multi-agent 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 a increasingly wide variety of applications, ranging from comparatively smal 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 multi-agent architecture. Our multi-agent 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 dia. (3) Message object is developed tocommunicate between the agents using KQML-like object. The proposed approach is applied to a simple model system, and the results show that the multi-agent system is an efficient decentralized approach for solving power system unit commitment problems.