Restoration of Smart Grid Distribution System

using Two-Way Communication Capability

R. Belkacemi, A. Babalola, F. Ariyo, IEEE Members
Center for Energy System Research
Tennessee Technological University
Cookeville, TN, USA
rbelkacemi@tntech.edu

Ali Feliachi, IEEE Senior Member

Advanced Power and Electricity Research Center
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV, USA
afeliachi@wvu.edu

Abstract In this Work, we investigate the use of two-way

communication to perform distributed restoration of smart power
grid distribution systems. The concept used in this research is
based on the distributed and intelligent multi-agent system
technology where multiple smart entities are geographically
spread and if equipped with communication capability these
entities are able to reach goals or solutions that would have been
impossible to reach with a single or a local control. The
technology is implemented on the West Virginia Super Circuit to
validate the theory. The results show that proposed system can
restore the power in a timely manner without violating any
constraints.
Index terms Restoration, Agents, Distribution, Outages,
Smart Grid.

transmission/distribution systems in a distributed fashion using

the two-way communication enabled by the smart grid
technology in order to relieve power lines, improve stability
response in case of disturbances and allow large scale
penetration of renewables.
In the literature, the immune system theory is looked at as
centralized algorithm used for optimization [1][2]. This
approach localizes the algorithm at a single cell type level and
does look at the system as whole with the different type of
cells and biological communication that takes place. This type
of approaches is not suitable for smart grid applications
because of the tendency for more distributed control to take
advantage of the two-way communication infrastructure
offered by the modern grids. In [3-6], the authors try to
implement a Multi agents system to perform restoration. The
authors fail to incorporate any intelligence into the agents
architecture and rely solely on the communication. This
approach fails in real system because the losses and will
violate the voltage constraint as shown in this work.
Furthermore, almost all the approaches are implemented on
radial systems and will fail to work in a meshed or two way
power flow systems while a high penetration of the of
renewables is expected in smart grid systems.

I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION

he proposed distributed intelligent control architecture is a

concept that aims at transforming the way energy
management of electric power systems is performed.
Distributed intelligence (Agents) is designed to anticipate and
mitigate stress in power systems, and autonomously manage,
efficiently and economically, the energy in a large electric
power system with intermittent generation sources and
controllable load serving entities.
The two-way communication platform concept of smart power
grids made it possible to integrate distributed and intelligent
systems such as Multi-Agent technology to manage the
transfer of energy at a global level. The distributed nature of
the power grid through a vast geographic area makes this
technology the most suitable approach to automatically
manage, operate, and control the grid in real time.
Distributed Intelligent Agents are adaptive, trained, self-aware,
self-healing, and autonomous control systems that respond
rapidly at the local level, to unburden centralized control
systems and human operators, and often are capable of
reaching goals difficult to achieve by an individual system.
This technology is expected to be the basis for appropriate
corrective actions to eliminate, mitigate, and/or prevent
outages and blackouts, thus improve grid reliability.
The objective of this research is to design an adaptive and
distributed multi-level control architecture based on the
Human Immune System Network acting as a multi-agent
system. The system will be able to manage the flow of the
power by acting on generators, renewables, and
978-1-4799-1255-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

In this work, a distributed, intelligent, and adaptive agent

based system is developed by designing a network with all the
immune system components, Meaning as a distributed system
with its different type of cells, namely Helper-cell, T-cell, Bcell etc., including their behaviors and the communication that
takes place between theses cells to build a complete, intelligent
Multi Agent System for Smart Grid Control.
II. DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
Distributed intelligent agents are computational components
distributed throughout the power grid that can sense the states
of the system such as voltages and currents and act on
actuators to alter the operation of the system in case of stress
or disturbance on the grid.
A centralized control of vast power systems with DGs, smart
meters would be very complex and data has to flow to a single
point which in turn increases the probability for failure.
In this work, a Zigbee network is developed to allow

communication between the nodes or agents, as shown in

Fig.2. The FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents)
standard is used as protocol for communication.

TABLE I
IMMUNE SYSTEM POWER SYSTEM MAS ANALOGY

Fig. 2. Communication Network

III. DISTRIBUTED IMMUNE SYSTEM NETWORK

An adaptive and intelligent immune system network is
designed by observing the different immune cells of the body.
The network of cells acts exactly as a distributed entities with
a pre-programmed tasks. These cells communicate and work
together as a team to attack viruses and bacteria invading the
body. Fig.3 illustrates the process followed by the cells to
eliminate threats to the body.

IV. DEPLOYMENT ON THE TEST SYSTEM

In this section the developed network is implemented on
Feeder #3 and Feeder#4 of the test system, shown in Fig.4.

Fig. 3. Immune Network Behavior

In the first phase of the attack the Macrophage consumes the

Virus or Bacteria and binds to a helper T-cell (TH) for antigen
presentation. The Helper T-cell causes other helper T-cells,
killer-T cells, B-cells to divide and mount the attack from
different angles.
To apply this theory in Smart grid systems, a mapping has to
be done. The table below illustrates how the mapping is
performed.

Fig.4. Test Circuit diagram

A zonal architecture is deployed on the system to match the

requirements of the circuit and the placement of the tie
switches on the feeders as illustrated in Fig.5.

Fig. 5. Zoning of the feeder line

A three phase permanent fault is applied in zone#6 (see Fig.

4). The following figures show voltages and currents during
the scenario and the process of restoration taken by the
developed architecture.
Fig. 6 depicts the waveform of the currents and voltages seen
at the substation. It can be observed that the protection system
,which a substation recloser, kick in first trying to clear the
fault. Since the fault is permanent, the recloser stay open after
two attempts. a signal is sent from the agent residing at the
substation level to the DG Agent in order to trip the DG to
avoid any damage as shown in Fig. 9. The fault isolation phase
follows right after that as illustrated in Fig. 7.

Then, the restoration the rest of the system starts as shown in

Fig. 8. The DG is then reconnected by the intelligent network
as depicted in Fig. 9.

Fig. 8. Current and Voltage in zone#7

Fig. 9. Current and Voltage in zone#8

In Fig.11 we are depicting the two-way communication that

took place between these intelligent entities during the entire
scenario.

Fig. 6. Current and Voltage at the substation

Fig. 7. Current and Voltage in the faulted zone#6

In the following, the agent network proposed in the literature

[3][4][6] is implemented on the same system. The same
scenario is performed without prior training of the system to
compare it to Multi Agent System proposed in this research.
We can observe that since no overloading of the system is
expected, the agents in this case, restore both zones#7&8 from
the neighboring feeder W#3. Because no training for voltage
violations was offered to the Agent at the design level this
strategy resulted in voltage violation or voltage drop below the
limit in zone#8 as shown in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10. Voltage in Zone#8

Fig. 11. Inter Agent Communication

[5]

V. CONCLUSION
The focus of this work is the development and deployment
of software Multi Agent System for Smart Grid power
distribution management. The paper addresses the use of the
Human Immune System viewed as a Multi-Agent System to
perform self-healing and control of the grid by automatic fault
location and isolation, reconfiguration and restoration. The
Simulation results show that the technology is very promising
and effective. The detailed model of immune system based
multi-agent system described above will be implemented in
hardware platform to validate the results.
VI. REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

A. Ahuja, S. Das, and Pahwa, An AIS-ACO Hybrid Approach for

Multi-Objective Distribution
System
Reconfiguration,
IEEE
transactions on power systems, vol. 22, no.3, August 2007, pp. 11011111
R. Belkacemi, A. Feliachi, "An Immune System Approach for Power
System Automation and Self Healing" IEEE PSCE09, March 15-18,
2009, Seattle, WA.
J. M. Solanki, S. Khushalani and N. N. Schulz, A Multi-Agent
Solution to Distribution Systems Restoration, IEEE Transactions on
Power Systems, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp 1026 1034, August 2007
J. G. Gomez-Gualdron, and M. Velez-Reyes Self-Reconfigurable
Electric Power Distribution System using Multi-Agent Systems,
Electric Ship Technologies Symposium, pp 180 187, May 2007

[6]

[7]

[8]
[9]

T. Nagata and H. Sasaki, A Multi-agent Approach to Power System

Restoration, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Vol. 17, No. 2, pp
457 462, May 2002
K. Nareshkumar, M.A. Choudhry, and H.J. Lai, A. Feliachi,
Application of multi-agents for fault detection and reconfiguration of
power distribution systems, Proceedings of the 2009 Power & Energy
Society General Meeting.
S. Chouhan, H. Wan, H.J. Lai, A. Feliachi, and M.A Choudhry,
Intelligent reconfiguration of smart distribution network using multiagent technology , Proceedings of the 2009 Power & Energy Society
General Meeting.
H. Inan, West Virginia Super Circuit Project_Preliminary Design
Document, Version 2.0, October 11, 2010
G. Weiss, Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed
Artificial Intelligence, The MIT Press, 2000