Enhancement of Energy Management in the Shipboard Power Systems Based on Recursive Distributed Load Shedding Model

Distributed energy management has been recognized as a promising solution for fast load scheduling in the ship power systems (SPSs). In the case of a power shortage, a reliable and accurate load shedding mechanism is necessary to avoid losing the significant loads. This paper proposes a distributed energy management framework in SPSs considering the load shedding possibility in the structure. The proposed method is constructed based on a multi-agent distributed consensus-based structure employing the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Through a recursive distributed formulation, the optimal load scheduling is satisfied and the extra uncharged loads with the least priorities are determined. Due to the nonlinearity of the problem formulation, a new optimization algorithm based on the firefly algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. In addition, a satisfactory modification method is developed to improve the search ability of the algorithm and avoid the premature convergence. A notional SPS is used to validate the performance of the proposed approach.