Mobile Agent Applications for Power Apparatus Monitoring and Maintenance

This is a project report from the Power Systems Engineering Research Center (PSERC). PSERC is a multi-university Center conducting research on challenges facing a restructuring electric power industry and educating the next generation of power engineers. More information about PSERC can be found at the Center's website: Notice Concerning Copyright Material PSERC members are given permission to copy without fee all or part of this publication for internal use if appropriate attribution is given to this document as the source material. This report is available for downloading from the PSERC website. Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (MERL) provided software and additional financial support for this project. Special thanks are due to Dr. David Wong from MERL, who constantly provided advice for this project. A part of the work has been financially supported by MERL during the summer of 2001 through a summer internship provided for Xiangjun Xu. Condition-monitoring data for power apparatus are usually distributed at different locations and reside on heterogeneous computer systems. The diversity of data ownership introduced by power industry restructuring adds more complexity for data sharing and exchanging. A system-wide communication approach is needed to efficiently process and distribute the data. In this project, mobile agent software has been applied to address the above problems. We have chosen the application scenarios of power apparatus monitoring and maintenance to illustrate certain data processing and exchanging problems. At the beginning of the project, we studied the functions of the mobile agent technique and compared the technique to other distributed information processing approaches. The most important characteristic of mobile agent software is that the program code, rather than the data, is moved to enable distributed processing over a local area network. This characteristic makes use of the mobile agent technique suitable for situations with distributed data sources. We have illustrated the advantages by implementing three mobile agent software applications. We have applied mobile agents to solve the problem of scheduling generating unit maintenance. In a decentralized operating environment characterizing competitive markets, the historical centralized data processing approach may no longer be feasible. Taking the problem of generating unit maintenance scheduling as an example, an independent system operator (ISO) has network data while a generation company (GENCO) knows only information about its units. They have to coordinate to obtain a feasible maintenance schedule. The proposed approach provides a more secure and flexible way of exchanging data between a GENCO and the …