A new cooperative multi-agent heater controller with its applications

Abstract

A large scale system including multi-elements that turn on and off their electric circuits such as heaters has some high risk of running short of the resource, that is power in this case, and may sometimes go down. The power consumed may exceed the capacity of the power supply, when a lot of the elemental heaters are switched on at the same instance. On average, even in that case, the power consumed may be enough low for the power to be supplied with adequate margin. If a very sophisticated server is built and concentrates allocating resource to the elements keeping the peak power consumed in the whole system lowered by gathering information from them, this shutdown may be circumvented. However, such specific server, even though built, is very much tuned to a specific system structure and not flexible, while the system had better be easily reconfigured and be robust for small mull functions that could occur. The paper here presents a novel multi-agent heater controller that maintains the temperature at each element, while the whole power consumed is kept constant, without any specific server in the system. Show more