Power Flow Analysis of Islanded Microgrids: A Differential Evolution Approach

Power flow (PF) analysis of microgrids (MGs) has been gaining a lot of attention due to the evolution of islanded MGs. To calculate islanded MGs' PF solution, a globally convergent technique is proposed using Differential Evolution (DE)- a popular optimization algorithm for global non-convex optimization. This paper formulates the PF problem as a constrained optimization problem (COP) considering all the operating conditions of the Droop Controlled Islanded MGs (DCIMGs). To solve the proposed COP, ϵDE-NGM, (Epsilon based Differential Evolution with Newton-Gauss-based mutation) is proposed. The proposed algorithm, ϵDE-NGM, is a novel variant of DE since it comprises a novel mutation operator, Newton-Gauss-based mutation (NGM). NGM includes all the important features of DE's mutation strategies as well as reduces the constraint violation by utilizing the information of constraint-space. Numerical experiments validate that the global convergence ability of proposed algorithms in solving COPs than existing state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm as a PF tool has better robustness than existing tools on ill- and well-conditioned systems with heavy loads, different limit violations, and inappropriate final solutions (far from the flat start). The performed comparative analysis confirms good agreement of accuracy and efficacy with the existing method for islanded MG's PF.