A remote supervisory system for a power system protection and control unit applying mobile agent technology

We apply mobile agent technology, which has attracted attention in the field of distributed software system, to a power system protection and control system. We have developed a system which can reduce the total cost of maintenance and management of protection and control equipment. We have proposed an Intranet Power System which performs supervisory control of a power system using Internet technology. We have proposed a mobile agent for power system protection and control system as part of the Intranet Power System. Although an agent is powerful in its ability to perform processing in a distributed network environment, a normal agent for business use does not offer a guarantee of operation within several milliseconds and real time performance. In this paper we propose the Real Time Mobile Agent Platform (RTMAP) which provides more powerful functions to synchronize between two or more agents in a distributed node, and redundancy to deal with unexpected communication failure. So the agent can now be applied to the power system protection and control system for which real time operation and advanced reliability are required. At present, a remote operating and monitoring system for protection and control equipment has been verified for real use and put into service. However, in order to perform maintenance or event analysis for two or more equipments, it is necessary for the operator to use the terminal (PC) for data collection and analysis, connecting and communicating each equipment individually. If we can use the agent proposed in this paper, then the information or equipment at two or more substations can be collected and analyzed automatically. Moreover if the database on a PC server performs further intensive management of data, then a full maintenance support system can be developed, and an increase more efficient maintenance work can be expected.