Cooperative methods for security planning

Abstract: "This paper develops a new approach to an old important and difficult problem: security planning in power system operations. The complexity of the problem is due primarily to two factors: (i) the large number of contingencies that need to be analyzed make it computationally intractable for real-time operations, and (ii) the problem has many solutions, and the global optimum is likely to be much better than the many local optima. We believe the problem is too big and difficult to be solved by any single, monolithic agent. Instead, we have developed a team of co-operative agents, called an A-Team, that is well-suited to solve this problem. The agents are autonomous, work in parallel, and communicate asynchronously. The paper describes the organizational structure of the team and presents results obtained both for the security-planning problem and for some other difficult global optimization problems."