Synthesizing Sparse and Delay-Robust Distributed Secondary Frequency Controllers for Microgrids

Consensus-based control schemes experience increasing popularity in the context of secondary frequency control in microgrids. Fundamental aspects in their practical implementation are the design of the communication topology as well as robustness with respect to both time-varying communication delays and exogenous disturbances. Motivated by this, we propose a design procedure for a consensus-based secondary frequency controller that ensures robustness with respect to heterogeneous fast-varying communication delays and simultaneously provides the option to trade off the L
₂
-gain performance against the number of required communication links. Our design criterion is equilibrium-independent and based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method for interval time-varying delays together with the descriptor method. The efficacy of the proposed approach is demonstrated by using numerical experiments on the CIGRE benchmark medium-voltage distribution network.