Distribution feeder protection and reconfiguration using multi-agent approach

This paper presents a multi-agent based protection scheme for reconfiguring and restoring the service of distribution feeders through effective fault diagnosis technique. Short-circuit faults occur frequently in power distribution networks and in such a condition, a proper fault detection is very important to either recover the system from collapse or reconfigure and restore the system after an outage. The detection of multiple fault locations in distribution feeders is challenging and time consuming tasks. In this paper, a hierarchy of relay agents and configuration agent is developed to coordinate the protection system operation. The relay agents contribute to the fault detection and isolation processes whereas the configuration agent reconfigures the system to restore maximum possible loads through effective relay coordination via information exchange. An 11 kV open ring distribution feeder is considered as test bed to evaluate the performance. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can identify multiple faults in the system accurately and reconfigure the system during the event of faults.