Market-based multiagent system for reconfiguration of shipboard power systems

On ships, the electric shipboard power system (SPS) supplies electrical power to critical functions such as navigation, communication, emergency systems, and in the case of warships, weapon systems. During ship operation, some parts of the SPS may become unavailable due to damage, fault, or maintenance. For the survivability and reliability of ships, it is desired to make the SPS highly reconfigurable. This paper presents a market-based multiagent system (MAS) for the reconfiguration of radial SPS. Radial SPSs are found on majority of ships. In the proposed MAS, each agent only communicates with its neighbor agents to make the system work in a fully decentralized manner. The MAS is implemented using Java Agent Development Framework (JADE), which is fully implemented in Java and compliant with Foundation of Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). An SPS with two generators and four loads is used for testing the proposed MAS. The results show the proposed MAS can successfully reconfigure a radial SPS.