Agents in smart grids

Abstract

Electricity has played an important role in the development of almost every technology, and has revolutionized human life with comfort and ease in every field. The electric power grid appeared to be the most complex machine on earth. Electricity has provided us with so many facilities to improve our living standard along with the increased demand for highly efficient, and more accurate and intelligent control systems to enhance the grid's reliability and efficiency. Conventionally, the electricity grid has been controlled and monitored using Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system which is centralized in nature but now, with the introduction of the idea of the smart grid and the availability of more intelligent entities, the grid has to be controlled and monitored by intelligent agents, giving the overall system a distributed nature. The power grid is moving towards a new era of having a decentralized nature, providing greater access to the market place for the consumers and integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DER) in the main grid to improve reliability and reduce energy cost.

Agents are intelligent entities placed in some environment to make wise decisions and act flexibly and autonomously based on their built-in intelligence along with their previous experiences. The smart grid is a vision of a grid with the abilities of integrating renewable energy resources in the grid, energy storage, enabling markets, self-healing, greater reliability, efficiency, improved power quality, etc. This master's thesis has focused on the main features of the smart grid, the anatomy of an agent (what exactly is it?) and the applications of these intelligent entities in a grid to achieve the envisioned goal of a smart grid. A thorough study and literature survey of intelligent agents as well as smart grids, relating the applications of agents in smart grids have been done. Agents appeared to be the intelligent entities best suited for the monitoring, control, electricity market activities and the efficient usage of energy. They provide a market place for electric vehicles and network reconfiguration. They enable self-healing during faults in the network, based on their distributed, self-contained characteristics. A multiagent based demand side management model has been proposed in this thesis.