A new modular nanogrid energy management system based on multi-agent architecture

Abstract

The emergence of renewable energy sources with controllable loads gave the opportunity to the consumers to build their own Microgrids. However, the intermittence of renewable energy sources such as wind and photovoltaic leads to some challenges in terms of balancing generation and consumption. This paper aims to present a novel multi-agent model based intelligent control scheme to balance the home/building alternative current (AC)-direct current (DC) load demands and renewable energy sources. The new proposed scheme consists of a three-level hierarchical multi agent system based on cooperation, communication and interaction between intelligent agents to fulfill the load's requirements. Then, the proposed multi agent framework is simulated using four different nanogrids to prove its effectiveness using different temporal profiles for loads and generators. The proposed model is designed to be modular, so that it can be considered as a sample from a set of similar modules, assigned to different buildings to allow efficient energy sharing and balancing. The used approach in this concept is inspired from auto-similar systems, which is well suited and easy to implement on multi agent systems. A co-simulation in MATLAB and JAVA/JADE platforms has been performed regarding the production-consumption of the 24 hours baseline period.