Driven by the development of smart grid technologies and information technologies, the future grid operations is evolving from the centralized control supporting load following to the distributed autonomous control supporting the interactions of “source-grid-load”. The cooperative control is the future for the interactive operation of power system to ensure the security of system and support the self-decision of participants. This paper discusses the trend of system operations and control in the future, points out the ubiquitousness of the flexible load and the triple properties of intelligent power unit, proposes a multi-agent based control structure for the interactive operation of grid, discusses the implementation of the multi-level cooperative control and introduces two applications of distributed cooperative control on the interconnected area frequency control and the air conditioner cluster control.