Although they are very promising, MAS are still an emerging technology in the field of power systems. Topics to explore in the future include: • Making agents smarter. Most agents used in MAS for power systems tend to be closer to reactive agents than to cognitive agents. Making them smarter would enable a greater autonomy […]

Davidson et al. [81] propose a fault diagnosis and management called PEDA, for protection engineering diagnosis agents (PEDA). PEDA has been used since 2004 by a British utility. Its objective is to automate the analysis and management of faults recorded by SCADAs and digital fault recorders (DFR). As thousands of faults can be recorded during […]

One of the earliest applications of MAS in power systems is for restoration, as described in Nagata and Sasaki [76]. Restoration is needed after a partial or global blackout has occurred. Operators usually employ an OMS to automatically restore power, by sequentially re-energizing all the buses in the grid so as to serve the loads. […]

Coordinating distributed energy sources in modernized power markets is another field where MAS-based cooperation can be employed. PowerMatcher, a concept developed by ECN in the Netherlands [51, 68, 69], is an example. The objective isto coordinate agents so as to balance supply and demand in an economically efficient way. To solve this problem, agents have […]

For all the reasons listed in the previous sections, MAS have been applied to solve several problems in power systems. The following four examples were published in the last decade. Based on the explanations from the previous sections, the reader is encouraged to analyze what choices the designers of the presented MAS have conducted. Other […]

Although it is possible to develop a MAS from scratch, using a dedicated devel­opment platform (middleware) is, in most cases, a much simpler solution. Many different toolkits were created over the years, as shown in [62]. These platforms include tools and functionalities that facilitate the development of MAS. Some of them comply with FIPA standards, […]

In order to attain their goals, agents are sometimes required to coordinate them­selves to cooperate or compete with each other, and dispatch tasks using inter­action protocols. In some cases, agents may be required to plan their actions before executing them. Actions can include rounds of interactions that must happen in a given order, for example […]

The described topologies define the interaction of an agent with another one, or entity, but it is still needed to define how they interact. Interactions are paramount notions for defining MAS [2]. An interaction between agents can only take place if they can act or communicate and if there are situations where they can get […]