A cyclic blackout mitigation system

Severe and long-lasting power shortages plague many developing countries and result in blackouts, the occurrence and duration of which are escalating; thus an efficient mitigation solution is much sought after. In the paper a distributed agent-based power aggregation and demand appeasement system for managing domestic demand during chronic cyclic blackouts is presented. Air conditioning appliances are dynamically grouped into adaptive clusters powered through the aggregation of superfluous power available from scattered standby generators while basic set appliances are powered from the rationed utility supply. The proposed approach was preceded by a field survey and implemented on the DDSM-IDEA platform, a development environment specially designed for this purpose. Simulation shows that the proposed solution provides an acceptable Quality-of-Service (QoS) level at minimum cost penalty. The solution is proven to be flexible and effective.