A mobile agent is a software program which can suspend its execution and resume it on another computer. Agents are a recent development which have become a popular and useful methodology for the modelling and implementation of distributed systems. The use of multi-agent systems in various areas suggests they may be appropriate for the design of power system automation systems.This is the first book to introduce the use of the Internet protocol suite and multi-agent systems for the information management, online monitoring and control of distributed power system substations. An open architecture is proposed: mobile agents are applied to the retrieval and analysis of substation data and to remote operator intervention; a prototype implementation of the architecture in the form of a substation information management system is described; and the architecture is evaluated theoretically.This is an excellent reference for postgraduates, researchers and academics as well as engineers and managers.

Dr David Buse obtained a first-class BSc degree in Computer Science in 2000, and a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering in 2005 from the University of Liverpool, UK. He is a Member of IEEE. His research interests include mobile agents, multi-agent systems, and their industrial applications. Prof. Henry Wu is the Chair of Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is also Director of the National Instruments e-Automation Laboratory at the University of Liverpool, in which research is focused on network-based industrial automation. He graduated from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China, in 1978 and obtained an MSc (Eng) degree in Electrical Engineering from HUST in 1981. Prof. Wu is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the IEE and a Senior Member of the IEEE. His research interests include systems analysis and control, computational intelligence, biologically-inspired modeling and computation, information processing and management, distributed complex systems, multi-agent systems, and their applications for power system operation and control.