A Comparative Analysis of Centralized and Decentralized Multi-agent Architecture for Service Restoration

Multi-agent systems (MAS) have recently evolved as an important feature in the development of future smart grids, especially to provide the fast-responding self-healing ability to the grid. This paper presents a comparative analysis of centralized and decentralized MAS architecture for the problem of service restoration. Service restoration is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved by implementing DG islanding using both the centralized and decentralized MAS approach. Simulation studies are conducted on 38, 69, and 119 bus test distribution systems for both the MAS architectures. From the simulated results, the following advantages of the decentralized MAS architecture over the centralized MAS are observed: a) lower computation time to determine the restoration solution, b) robust to communication failure (not prone to single point failure), c) efficient restoration for multiple fault situations, d) lower communication cycles to discover the information.