Development of Distributed Power Outage Scheduling System by Using Bee-gent

Abstract

Power Outage Scheduling Problem is a distributed constraint satisfaction problem where scattered local power stations have to make consistent schedules with one another. However, synchronous backtrack algorithms, a well-known method for distributed constraint satisfaction problems, have difficulty handling rapid schedule adjustments and impartial assignement of power station schedules. Thus we propose two kinds of heuristics: parallel assignment and multiple priority strategies. We also developed a distributed system for the power outage scheduling problem which makes use of the above heuristics in order to ensure efficiency. The system is based on Bee-gent (Bonding and Encapsulation Enhancement aGENT framework) and consists of schedulers for each power station and mediation agents which have cloning & merging functions to support the implementation of the heuristics. The result of the experiment shows the improvement when handling rapid adjustment and impartiality issues and that this improvement is provided by reasonable computational overhead.