I am starting to think that my application area for MAL will be in smart grid tech.  I was talking to Stephen (PhD student that works at the NRL) and he suggested Navy ships and subs as a possible place to look into.  So, I looked it up and they do seem to already use smart grid tech.  Which makes sense since they are already using nuclear power to run the ships.  I then thought of mobile smartgrids/microgrids for the army.  I found that back in 2012 they were starting testing this sort of tech.  http://www.army.mil/article/88440/

My main interests are on the large scale like a city.  If we consider each house an agent and we have a hierarchy of agents (proposed by Kevin so that we don’t have to deal with privacy concerns) then each agent has objectives, actuators, sensors and can communicate.  Kevin’s project involves creating the sensor network that will feed the sensor data to a central location.  This location will be the agent that makes decisions based off of that data and communication with other agents.  I am interested in the problem of the agents learning to work together cooperatively to achieve their objectives.

My plan would be to find/develop a simulator that simulates the rest of the smart grid and will have one of the houses linked to real sensors that Kevin has out.

Also, my company Procyon R&D may get a subcontract with developing the software for the control of the battery storage devices that will be installed in Hawaii’s smart grid project.  (http://smartgrid.epri.com/DemoProjects.aspx).  I will need to become familiar with http://smartgrid.epri.com/SimulationTool.aspx the simulation tool for smart grids and maybe use this as the interface into Kevin’s sensor network.  Unfortunately, that tool is written in Delphi XE2 and pascal.  I found https://github.com/rwl/DSS which is in Java that is 2 years old but I might still use instead since that is probably the last time epri released anything new.  Otherwise it seems the recommended way is to use Matlab.

 

https://sites.google.com/site/luisfochoa/research/opendss possibly helpful website.