As computing systems are being applied to ever more demanding and complex domains, the infeasibility of constructing a single, monolithic problem solver becomes more apparent. Furthermore, important applications such as different types of management control systems for power generation and distribution are inherently distributed. A promising novel research direction to overcome complexity barriers in the design and maintenance of complex distributed applications is based on the view of such systems as societies of cooperating agents. In this paper we describe an agent oriented design for load man-agement in an automated power distribution system and a testbed for implementations of such systems. We also present an agent with some novel and important features. The research reported here is a cooperation between the authors’ affiliations mentioned above, and it is a part of the larger projects, Intelligent Distribution Automation (IDA) at Sydkraft, Sweden, and Societies of Computation (SoC) at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden.