Overview of Consensus Protocol and Its Application to Microgrid Control

Abstract

Different control strategies for microgrid applications have been developed in the last decade. In order to enhance flexibility, scalability and reliability, special attention has been given to control organisations based on distributed communication infrastructures. Among these strategies, the implementation of consensus protocol stands out to cooperatively steer multi-agent systems (i.e., distributed generators), which is justified by its benefits, such as plug and play capability and enhanced resilience against communication failures. However, as the consensus protocol has a long trajectory of development in different areas of knowledge including multidisciplinary subjects, it may be a challenge to collect all the relevant information for its application in an emerging field. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to provide the fundamentals of multi-agent systems and consensus protocol to the electrical engineering community, and an overview of its application to control systems for microgrids. The fundamentals of consensus protocol herein cover the concepts, formulations, steady-state and stability analysis for leaderless and leader-following consensus problems, in both continuous- and discrete-time. The overview of the applications summarises the main contributions achieved with this technique in the literature concerning microgrids, as well as the associated challenges and trends.

Distributed secondary control of microgrids with unknown disturbances and non-linear dynamics

“…In this study, each generator in the microgrid is considered to be an agent. Using the idea of a multi-agent system (Fan et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020;Ferreira et al, 2022), this tracking problem can be transformed into a leader-following problem, with a fixed value for the leader agent. Then, by applying graph theory, the communication relationships between generators can be represented as a communication topology network.…”

Optimized Distributed Cooperative Control for Islanded Microgrid Based on Dragonfly Algorithm

“…Figure 6 depicts the execution of the PR control scheme. The math modeling of an ideal PR controller may be characterized as [39]:…”

“…The droop control mechanism is tasked with modifying voltage phase and value in accordance with the (P and Q), hence facilitating control over the flow of (P and Q). The functions of the droop control may be described as follows [39]:…”

Moving Microgrid Hierarchical Control to an SDN-Based Kubernetes Cluster: A Framework for Reliable and Flexible Energy Distribution

“…For example, refs. [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ] proposes a two-level hierarchical control capable of regulating the active and reactive power sharing. However, despite using a low-bandwidth communication system, the topology needed to be more scalable due to the recent development of complex control algorithms.…”