A Model-Predictive Control Method for Coordinating Virtual Power Plants and Packetized Resources, with Hardware-in-the-Loop Validation

In this paper, we employ a bi-level control system to react to disturbances and balance power mismatch by coordinating distributed energy resources (DERs) under packetized energy management. Packetized energy management (PEM) is a novel bottom-up asynchronous and randomizing coordination paradigm for DERs that guarantees quality of service, autonomy, and privacy to the end-user. A hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation of a cyber-physical system consisting of PEM enabled DERs, flexible virtual power plants (VPPs) and transmission grid is developed in this work. A predictive, energy-constrained dispatch of aggregated PEM-enabled DERs is formulated, implemented, and validated on the HIL cyber-physical platform. The energy state of VPPs, composed of a fleet of diverse DERs distributed in the grid, depend upon the distinct real-time usage of these devices. The experimental results demonstrate that the existing control schemes, such as AGC, dispatch VPPs without regard to their energy state, which leads to unexpected capacity saturation. By accounting for the energy states of VPPs, model-predictive control (MPC) can optimally dispatch conventional generators and VPPs to overcome disturbances while avoiding undesired capacity saturation. The results show the improvement in dynamics by using MPC over conventional AGC and droop for a system with energy-constrained resources.