Real-time electric load management for DC zonal all-electric ship power systems

•Real-time load management for electric ships to improve system stability.•Distributed control for loads improves the ship survivability and resilience.•Pulse load is coordinated with other controllable loads in real time. All-electric ship power systems have limited generation and include a large portion of nonlinear loads and dynamic loads relative to the total power capacity. In DC zonal ship power systems, power converter constraints and motor load voltage constraints need to be satisfied in operational real time. Sudden load changes may cause significant frequency oscillations on the AC side of the system. The load dynamics and priorities also need to be considered. Thus, individual loads in the DC zonal system need to be optimally regulated in operational real time to improve the power quality and system level stability. In this paper, a heterogeneous multi-agent system (MAS) framework was developed for a DC zonal system of an all-electric ship power system to achieve dynamic generation and load balancing while satisfying operational constraints as well as considering load priorities. The developed method integrates system dynamics and various operational constraints into MAS and controls individual loads using decentralized cooperative controller. Simulation results on a two-zone notional all-electric ship power system simulated in PSCAD software show the viability and performance of the proposed technique.