Optimal Short-Term Generation Scheduling with Multi-Agent System under a Deregulated Power Market

With the opening of the power industry to competition, the power system structure is changing. According to these changes, power system operation, planning, and control need modifications. Under this deregulated power market, generation companies (GENCOs) can schedule their generators to maximize their own profit without accurately satisfying system demand/reserve, which is a traditional short-term generation scheduling constraint that needs changes. Power and reserve prices become important factors in decision process. In this paper, we adopt the multi-agent system to help GENCOs make decision on scheduling their generators, selling the power and reserving to the market to receive the maximum profit. Our multi-agent system consists of three kinds of agents: one central-agent, one mobile-agent and some generator-agents. The agents are provided with the intelligence of using dynamic programming and rulebased method to solve the problem corporately. Our method is different from the traditional centralized short-term generation scheduling, it solve the new scheduling problem in a distributed way. Results from simulation on this system show good performance of this proposed methodology. Copyright c © 20042005 Yang’s Scientific Research Institute, LLC. All rights reserved.