A two stage algorithm for optimal management of isolated microgrid

The critical issues in a renewable energy based microgrid are ensuring continuous availability of power to the critical loads, and to provide supply to the maximum possible portion of the system under any abnormal conditions by topology management. An intelligent load shedding and fast reconfiguration of the system is therefore necessary in order to serve the critical loads and to maintain a proper power balance in the microgrid. This paper presents a novel two stage strategy for load shedding and reconfiguration of microgrid using Binary Firefly Algorithm (BFA). In the first stage, the BFA determines the optimal load configuration with minimum load shedding. Reconfiguration of the microgrid with minimum number of switching operations to serve maximum load is done in the second stage using BFA. The strength of the proposed strategy is that reconfiguration is done only if necessary and is illustrated with MATLAB results on modified Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions(CERTS) microgrid.