SHIPBOARD POWER SYSTEMS RECONFIGURATION: A COMPARED ANALYSIS OF STATE-OF-THE-ART APPROACHES

The Shipboard Power System (SPS) supplies power to navigation, communication, operation and critical systems. The capability of facing single or multiple faults is a mandatory issue for any vessel. This paper reports a systematic comparison on SPS reconfiguration methods, where most recent contributions to the field have been classified according to taxonomy of criteria, such as: reconfiguration techniques, reconfiguration sub-problems, and characteristics of the electrical layer. Reconfiguration procedure should be timely in restoring power in faulted areas of the ship, also to avoid subsequent cascade failure; the reconfiguration sub-problems involve priority definition among loads and operations, strongly depending from the electrical layers and the fault diagnosis methodology; moreover, reconfiguration techniques include several different control architectures and loads priority schemas.