SUPPLY RESTORATION IN ELECTRIC DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS : A MULTI-AGENT APPROACH

Energy Management Systems can benefit from the multi-agent approach at different levels. This approach offers potential to bring efficient solutions to the problem of system supervision and supply restoration in the event of contingencies. The goal of this paper is to present a supply restoration method for electric distribution based on the repair solution philosophy as opposed to the analytical methods traditionally employed to solve this problem. To implement this restoration method, a multiagent model of the network is proposed in order to find, by cooperation between agents, a satisfactory balance between the available supply and its restoration in the network. This research is developed on the basis of a study performed on the operation of a real electricity company. Since the electricity supply is a crucial service for the society, all electricity network equipment is subjected to voltage and current constraints in order to operate within safe and efficient levels. For that purpose the status of the network is thus continuously monitored through data acquisition on the system variables. The network control is performed by commands issued manually or electromechanically on fault detection and protection devices such as relays and switch breaks, and usually accounts on informatics systems such as the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) (Lehtonen 1998).