Agent-based distributed consensus algorithm for decentralized economic dispatch in Smart Grid

The agent based solutions are successfully applied in research and have impressive results. However, at the present, the agent technology is the realm of theory and laboratory simulation. The paper presents an attempt to bridge the gap. To facilitate migration of agent technology to the field, we propose to apply industrial standards such as IEC 61499 to design and implement the agent based algorithms. IEC 61499 is reference architecture for development of distributed systems. As an example of agent based solution to power system problem we consider Incremental Cost Consensus (ICC) algorithm for solving economic dispatch problem. The original system was simulated in Matlab. The agent based 5 node system was developed using IEC 61499 and deployed to 5 industrial controllers, then tested. With the proposed approach the agent algorithms can be designed, tested and deployed within one framework without the overhead of re-coding the solution for different stages. The proposed approach enables directly executable agent solutions and paves the way to the industrial adoption of the agent technology in power system domain.