Multi-agent systems for reactive power control in smart grids

• This paper presents a decentralized framework for the optimal reactive power control in smart grids.
• The framework is based on the Holons, which are evolving, self-organizing, and dissipative structures.
• All the reactive power resources are fully exploited so as to keep the network security constraints.
• The prevailing uncertainties pertaining to renewable energy sources (RES) are taken into account.

Power system monitoring is the most fundamental prerequisite for making reasonable decisions in a control center. In recent years, with the advent of smart grids, monitoring and control of reactive power in power systems has entered a new era. This issue have highlighted the need for effective methods of decentralized optimal reactive power control (DORPC), especially based on the new available frameworks which have emerged along with the smart grids. This paper presents a novel approach to the DORPC problem based on a Holonic architecture. The Holonic architecture has some unique features by which the objective of the DORPC problem could be optimized through a timely proposed strategy. In order to demonstrate the features of the proposed approach, it is compared with two other methods considering a set of indices. Accordingly, the proposed approach has great potential to reduce the active power losses and to fully exploit the available reactive power resources. It requires a limited set of data while improves the fault tolerance of the network.