Overview of Multi-Agent Approach for Micro-Grid Energy Management

As the power generation paradigm is going green by involvement of renewable energy sources, the energy management process also has to evolve towards new more powerful, intelligent control methods. The inter-connection of a large number of renewable energy sources to the grid, along with their obvious advantages, makes the grid highly distributed. This may cause problems of efficient control, stability, reliability, power quality and security, thus represent one of the greatest engineering challenges. To enable greater amounts of distributed and renewable energy resources across the power grid backbone for providing better demand management, the next-generation electricity grid is emerging as a system of organically integrated intelligent Micro-Grids. In order to make them intelligent the application of Information & Communication Technology (ICT), remote sensing and communication technology to power systems is gaining momentum making Micro-Grids smart. Agent-oriented software engineering paradigm represents an interesting means of analyzing, designing and building complex software systems, quite suitable to the requirements of making Micro-Grids smart. Multi-Agent System (MAS) seems to have marvelous features that meet the operation and control requirements of distributed energy resources in Micro-Grids. This paper presents an overview of the emerging sub-field of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent System to control and manage the changing face of electric power grid by inculcating the intelligent agents into Micro-Grids.