A multi-agent approach to outage work scheduling for electric power system

This paper proposes a multi-agent approach to power system switching operations in normal states. The proposed multi-agent system consists of several facilitator-agents (FAGS), equipment-agents (EAGs) and switch-box-agents (SBAGs). FAG acts as a manager for negotiation process between agents. EAG corresponds to an equipment of the electric power system such as a bus, a transformer and a transmission line, while SBAG is a pseudo-object which consists of neighboring circuit breakers and disconnecting switches. The proposed multi-agent system realizes appropriate switching operations by interacting with neighboring agents. Computer tests on a model system show that the proposed approach is effective and promising.