Agent-based energy management in railways

The future railway distribution system, expected to follow the evolution of the smart grid, is a large system comprising active and passive loads (trains and buildings), energy sources (particularly distributed energy resources (DER) or on-board regenerated energy) and storages (wayside or onboard storage systems). Each of these entities can play a significant role in an integrated energy management system. For dealing with such a complex system, a multi-agent system (MAS) is proposed in this paper to distribute the intelligence among individual actors and to tackle the scalability challenge. The proposed multi-agent system applies concepts typical of the smart grid for defining functionalities, actions and information. The MAS specification, problem formulation and optimization procedures, with emphasis on the minute ahead optimization, are described in this paper.