An Novel Approach for the Design of Bus Management Agent Clusters for Power System Control and Protection

In this paper, we propose a multi-agent methodology (MAM) for power system monitoring and protection. The uniqueness of the proposed architecture is the ability of MAM to evolve in the wake of an attack of malicious intent by mutation and thus always monitoring a power system bus remotely. Also, the architecture interacts with the mutated agents using a voting methodology thus alleviating the effect of agent malfunction in the presence of an attack. This architecture also enables inter-agent communication which makes a collaborative framework and increases the degree of fault tolerance. This architecture is tested on a two-area, five-machine, and 8 bus power network for abnormal condition detection, generator bus isolation, and also for restoring power to the area which is affected by the bus isolation. Simulation studies indicate that the proposed methodology is capable of not only detecting the power grid attack but it can also continuously monitor and isolate the generator bus even in the presence of sustained attack as the agents are regenerated.