Enabling the Analysis of Emergent Behavior in Future Electrical Distribution Systems Using Agent‐Based Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

In future electrical distribution systems, component heterogeneity and their cyber-physical interactions through electrical lines and communication lead to emergent system behavior. As the distribution systems represent the largest part of an energy system with respect to the number of nodes and components, large-scale studies of their emergent behavior are vital for the development of decentralized control strategies. This paper presents and evaluates DistAIX, a novel agent-based modeling and simulation tool to conduct such studies. The major novelty is a parallelization of the entire model—including the power system, communication system, control, and all interactions—using processes instead of threads. Thereby, a distribution of the simulation to multiple computing nodes with a distributed memory architecture becomes possible. This makes DistAIX scalable and allows the inclusion of as many processing units in the simulation as desired. The scalability of DistAIX is demonstrated by simulations of large-scale scenarios. Additionally, the capability of observing emergent behavior is demonstrated for an exemplary distribution grid with a large number of interacting components.

An Improved Backward/Forward Sweep Power Flow Method Based on a New Network Information Organization for Radial Distribution Systems

“…e presence of common buses and derivations had lead to develop several methods to define landmarks able to help browsing all network branches. As used in reference [9], network elements are divided into several layers with no common buses which lead to the use of equation 2in each layer and then the results of each layer are added to get the current at the bus of the substation. In [8], the authors in order to avoid browsing network elements and searching from where to start and which path to follow in the backward and the forward sweep, they use two matrices, BIBC and BCBV.…”

“…Avoiding those investments is possible, thanks to a tool named "load flow analysis" [7], which is able to calculate the needed network information only from the values of load consumed or injected of each node. Load flow analysis is a widely used tool transmission system in several applications, as power generating scheduling [8], and could also be very useful for many applications in distribution networks, such as network analysis [9], load control [10,11], network reconfiguration [12], integration of generation [13], optimal allocation of UPQC [14], and integration of electric vehicle [15]. Several methods had been developed and deployed in the transmission system such as Gauss-Seidel [16], Newton-Raphson [17] and fast-decoupled methods [18].…”

Scalable assessment method for agent‐based control in cyber‐physical distribution grids

“…Following [23], we choose to use an approach based on parallel computing to achieve a scalable simulation of the electrical grid and the agent‐based control. The simulation tool DistAIX [24] is the basis of the proposed assessment method for three reasons: First, it is shown in [3] that DistAIX exhibits outstanding scalability compared to other software tools for the simulation of cyber‐physical distribution grids. Second, DistAIX allows for an intuitive implementation of agent‐based concepts since it utilises agent‐based modelling.…”

“…The simulation tool DistAIX [3] is the core element of both parts of the proposed assessment method. For this work, DistAIX is extended with a generic and real‐time capable SiL interface.…”

Proposal of an Adaptive Neurofuzzy System to Control Flow Power in Distributed Generation Systems

“…An approach for power flow and voltage regulation using multiagents is proposed in [16,17]. The attractive characteristic of multiagents is the distributive operation; related to this issue, [18] proposed a tool for agent simulation for decentralized control strategies in electrical distribution systems; this tool allows observing the emergent behavior produced by agents. Additionally, in [19] is presented a proposal based on consensus protocol for cooperative voltage control applied to wind farms.…”