Agent-based distributed simulation

Simulating a large-scale power system with detailed modeling of the components creates a heavy computational burden. One possible way to relieve the computational burden is to decouple the network into subsystems and solve the subsystem independently, and then combine the results of the subsystems to get the solution. The way to decouple network and represent the missing parts will affect the result greatly. The equivalent for other networks needs to be constructed to allow power system analysis. In addition with more intelligent devices being introduced, simulation of a power system with intelligent control is even more difficult. In this paper, an agent based distributed simulation is proposed to handle the issues above. An agent based distributed simulation achieves an overall system solution through separately and concurrently computing subsystems with the agents' communications over the network. A history of distributed simulation and agent techniques is briefly introduced. A generalized three-phase coupling method dealing with natural coupling is proposed. Both natural coupling and signal level coupling agent-based models are developed and demonstrated in virtual test bed (VTB). The models are tested with a simple case and the test results are presented and analyzed