Multi agent systems: an example of dynamic reconfiguration

A multi-agent framework for monitoring and control of power electronics systems may comprise agents with different tasks: strictly measurement, control, computation, decision making, simulation and more. Each task is best performed within a dedicated environment: Lab VIEW, Matlab, custom simulators and more. The focus of this work is a heterogeneous agent-based monitoring and control system; the aim of this work is to allow the use of interactive and proactive capabilities proper of agents within this complex environment. For this purpose interfaces between the agent environment and the measurement, control and simulation environment have been implemented. The application presented in this work is a limited-power, power electronics system. The experimental results of this application demonstrate how a multi-agent architecture can be usefully employed to coordinate the roles and operations performed by the agents. In particular, the results show the capability of the multi-agent system to perform load reconfiguration to allow for a sudden increase in power demand.