Abstract
KEYWORDS – E/E Architecture, Power Net, Electrical Energy Management, Multi-Agent System, Load balancing
ABSTRACT –
Due to continuous effort to reduce CO2 emissions, smarter electrical components are widely used in vehicles, making possible a more efficient management of the electrical power generation, storage, distribution and control. Such components include intelligent generators; battery management systems to prevent battery from operating outside its safe operation area; power distribution units that provide power to various electrical loads and can as well measure the current of the power lines.
In this paper, a Multi-Agent System cooperative electrical energy manager for a passenger vehicle is developed to balance loads and electrical power generation in real time while satisfying system's operations.
Generally vehicular electrical energy management systems currently used are centralized: a single manager controls power generation device and all manageable power consuming devices; this requires detailed information from all devices and lacks of flexibility. Multi-agent system is a distributed computational intelligent technology, which has a great potential to use for control and management in power engineering.
The key benefits of multi-agent system are flexibility and extendibility, which motivates the use of this approach for implementing electrical energy management. The system optimally regulates the generated power and switch status for each controllable load in the vehicle power net system to maintain the system stability and functionality, the level of safety of the loads is also considered.
The decentralized control framework has the capability to integrate multiple sources of electrical power, distribution units and loads into the overall control system to achieve group goals in real time through vehicular communication bus.