Investigation of communication media requirements for self healing power distribution systems

Todays electric power distribution systems are very complex and power systems restructuring also has introduced new complexities in controlling of these systems. Multi agent systems (MAS) are one of the popular approaches to improve the efficiency, reliability and safety through automated distributed control and modern communication technologies in power systems. A multi agent system structure could be centralized, hierarchical or distributed and communication system plays a key role in establishing any control strategy using multi agent systems. This paper presents a comparison between wired and wireless communication media performance in self-healing power distribution systems. Power systems dynamics gets influenced by the communication delays in the network and the purpose of this work is to study the effect of communication media on different multi agent system structures used in literature, in order to determine the suitable MAS and media choices for power distribution networks. The comparison criteria are delay (latency) and reliability of each communication media. In this study an existing Mon Power circuit is used as test network. Matlab® Simulink software and S-functions (user-defined functions) are used to integrate the power system and communication network models and build a co-simulation framework for this study.