Agent based distributed control of islanded microgrid — Real-time cyber-physical implementation

In the hierarchical control of an islanded microgrid, secondary control could be centralized or distributed. The former control strategy has several disadvantages, such as single point of failure at the level of the central controller as well as high investment of communication infrastructure. In this paper a three-layer architecture of distributed control is given, including the device layer, the control layer as well as the agent layer. The agent layer is a multi-agent system in which each agent is in charge of a distributed generation unit. Due to communication network constraints, agents are connected only to nearby neighbors. However, by using consensus algorithms the agents can discover the required global information and compute new references for the control layer. The proposed control system is tested on a microgrid scenario which includes paralleled inverter sources. For this, the system is implemented on a real-time cyber-physical test platform that combines real-time simulation models running in OPAL-RT with a network of ARM-based computers, representing the agents.