Scalable assessment method for agent-based control in cyber-physical distribution grids

Abstract

This study proposes a scalable method to assess agent-based control concepts and deployment systems for cyber-physical electrical distribution grids. The deployment system of an agent-based control concept is the system that executes the agents and their interactions in a real implementation. Due to the increasing number of controllable loads, generators, and storage systems installed in distribution grids, scalability of control concepts and deployment systems plays a key role. Hence, the assessment method for both has to be scalable itself. For this reason, the proposed method bases on DistAIX, an open-source scalable simulation tool for cyber-physical distribution grids designed for execution on distributed computing clusters. DistAIX is extended with an interface for coupling with the deployment system of the agent-based control approach. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated for an agent-based control concept called SwarmGrid-X and the deployment system cloneMAP. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method and exemplify the functionality and scalability of SwarmGrid-X and cloneMAP.