Scientists at Novosibirsk State Technical University (NETI) are developing a technology that improves the reliability and survivability of the power system.
Work on the creation of prototypes of agents of decentralized management technology and their testing was carried out within the framework of the Priority 2030 program.
According to Anatoly Osintsev, Associate Professor of the Department of Electric Power Plants at NSTU-NETI, Candidate of Technical Sciences, a hierarchical management structure of power systems has now developed. It allows you to coordinate the actions of a large number of facilities (power plants, substations, networks), quickly manage operating modes, quickly respond to emergency situations and restore normal functioning in case of failures. There is a dispatch control, where they monitor and adjust the operation of power systems through commands and orders, there are information communication channels used to transfer commands between various objects of the power system to control and ultimately ensure uninterrupted, reliable and efficient operation.
Combining low-power facilities with their own load leads to the emergence of low-power power systems in which the traditional management structure is economically and technically impractical. Scientists at NSTU-NETI have proposed autonomous management of such systems without centralized distribution of commands.
"We have developed prototypes of local mode control devices (agents) in low-generation power systems, each of which has specific functions of regime and/or emergency management. These functions are performed without human intervention. The result is a swarm—type distributed artificial intelligence system — agents work independently of each other, but due to the uniform rules of operation, a common result is achieved," said Anatoly Osintsev.
The advantages of the technology are an increase in the reliability of the power system and its survivability — the ability to restore normal operation in case of various disturbances, such as short circuits, equipment failures or disconnections of individual network elements. According to the scientist, the technology allows you to disassemble the network in the area of damage, that is, to disconnect the damaged parts of the network, and then automatically assemble what remains in operation, without harming the consumer, as safely as possible for generating equipment.
"The setting of relay protection settings at low-power generating plants is designed in such a way that any short circuit in the adjacent network, which is switched off with a time delay, will lead to a massive shutdown of the generators. An alternative option is to separate the station with its load from the external network as quickly as possible. We offer a range of emergency management methods, new ways of relay protection in the electrical network, where low—power facilities are combined," adds Anatoly Osintsev.
In the summer, a scientific seminar "Methodological issues of reliability research of large energy systems" was held on the basis of NSTU-NETI. During the event, scientists demonstrated the technology's operation on a physical model of the energy system.: they recreated emergency situations, for example, they simulated short circuits in various parts of the network and showed how automation behaves, how it comes out of emergency situations autonomously, without human intervention.
To implement this technology, many methods are involved that have already been patented, in particular, a method for protecting power transmission lines and emergency control in distributed generation electric networks (patent 2024), a method for decentralized synchronization and restoration of normal operation of an emergency divided electric network with generators (patent 2022).