Abstract
The integrated power system (IPS) within an AC-DC zonal distribution system helps to increase the ship survivability, flexibility and reliability. By reducing ship susceptibility to faults and disturbances, decentralized reconfiguration is preferable over traditional centralized reconfiguration techniques used for terrestrial power grids. This paper introduces new modified architecture of the AC-DC zonal distribution system for the IPS, and explores a novel multi-agent system (MAS) based reconfiguration strategy. The intelligent agents developed within this work can automatically change the topology of the IPS when a fault happens, utilizing the inherent distributed control feature of MAS to increase survivability and reliability of shipboard power systems. The MAS has been designed, modeled and simulated using JADE within a JAVA platform. The simulation results for the given Shipboard Power System (SPS) test case provide a proof-of-concept for the functionality of the MAS based reconfiguration strategy.