Robust Consensus-Based Distributed Energy Management for Microgrids With Packet Losses Tolerance

The well-developed consensus algorithm provides an elegant distributed way for solving the energy management problem. The convergence of the consensus-based distributed approach depends on the reliable exchange of the information with neighbors. This assumption might be violated in practice due to inevitable and random packet losses. In this paper, the impact of packet losses on the consensus-based distributed approach is analyzed. We show the iterative calculation converges to an incorrect solution in the presence of packet losses, where the power supply could not meet with the demand. More importantly, we find the error in the final result is accumulated over every packet loss event, and we identify the critical information that cause the error. Based on the analysis, a corrective method is proposed to assure convergence to the right schedule. The corrective method has two features: 1) it uses the original consensus network, and no communication reconfiguration is needed; and 2) no retransmissions for the lost packets are needed, instead, the errors are compensated by a new variable introduced in the update rule. We show that the proposed algorithm could achieve the optimal solution in the presence of packet losses. Numerical simulation results are used to validate the proposed algorithm.