A multi-agent based algorithm for mesh-structured shipboard power system reconfiguration

A shipboard power system (SPS) supplies energy to electrical loads on a ship. It is critical for the system to be reconfigurable for the purpose of survivability and reliability. In our earlier work an agent based de-centralized approach for a radial SPS reconfiguration is successfully developed. Each agent in this system only communicates with its immediate neighbors, which reduces the dependency on the system topology. However, when expanding the technique to a meshed structure in the SPS, this lead to the problem of redundant information accumulation among the agents, making the information flow in the system unstable. In this paper, the authors propose a spanning tree algorithm for an agent system, which breaks the mesh-structured system into a single tree-structured system. Then an algorithm for calculating the information flow among agents without redundant information accumulation is presented. Finally, the proposed methodology is illustrated by a test case on a simplified SPS