A multi-agent approach to unit commitment problems

This paper proposes a multi-agent system for solving unit commitment problems. Multi-agent is a new paradigm for developing software applications. Coordinating the behavior of autonomous agents is a key issue in agent oriented programming techniques today. In this paper, we develop a power system unit commitment application using multi-agent architecture. Our model has the following characteristics: (1) the system consists of a single facilitator agent, several generator-agents, and two kinds of mobile agent; (2) the facilitator agent is developed to act as a manager for the process by using the singleton design pattern. The mobile agent and generator agent have simple negotiation strategies; and (3) the message object is developed to communicate between agents using a KQML-like object. The proposed approach is applied to a simple system, and the results show that the multi-agent system is able to find optimal solutions for unit commitment problems.