Adaptation in load shedding under vulnerable operating conditions

The proposed approach to avoiding catastrophic failures in interconnected power systems uses a defensive system based on multiagent system technologies. Due to their dynamic environments, these agents need to automatically adjust their decision criteria. The method of reinforcement learning with temporal differences can provide a suitable basis for the adaptation. An appropriate convergence criterion is derived and an application of the method to load shedding is demonstrated. A dynamic simulation involving a 179-bus power system is used to validate the method.