Real Time Analysis of a Multi-Agent Based Distributed Control Strategy for Islanded AC Microgrids

This paper presents a distributed control approach for attaining a reliable active power sharing performance on an islanded AC microgrid with inductive interconnection lines. Despite the lower complexity of the conventional decentralized schemes, their power sharing performance is poor as they only rely on their local measurements. Also, their voltage and frequency regulation suffer from high level of deviation based on the local droop terms and the line dominant impedance. The centralized schemes also never gained the high level of popularity as they are highly vulnerable in terms of communication failures and cyber-attacks. In order to ensure a superior active power sharing performance, a distributed control algorithm based on the consensus multi agent concept is proposed. Through intercommunication between the bus agents, the proper power sharing based on the supply-demand theory is achieved. The effectiveness of the proposed distributed controller at the secondary layer is verified through real time simulation studies under different load profiles. A comparative approach with respect to the typical averaging based distributed control highlights the differences.