A Software Architecture Based on Multi-Agent and Grid Computing for Electric Power System Applications

This paper first reviews the application of computing technology in electric power system, with emphasis on the evolution of the software architecture. And then proposes a software architecture to implement power system operation and computing. As power systems have become more complicated, software tools and simulations have played a more important role. The operation and control of the power system is actually becoming a huge data-intensive, information-intensive, communication-intensive and computing-intensive application. Power systems rely more heavily on computerized communications and control. Therefore, system security has become increasingly dependent on protecting the integrity of the associated information systems. Grid computing is generally regarded as a software technology to fully use the spare computing resources. However, the philosophy of grid computing can be used in engineering case to play an important role in power system distributed monitoring, control and distributed parallel computing. This paper proposes a software architecture, which depends on grid computing for hardware support and agent technology for software support, to seamlessly integrate the dispersed computing resources to implement high-performance operation and computing in electric power system. Some comparative test cases are studied, and the test results show that the combination of agent and grid computing can enhance the performance of the distributed computing system