Real-Time Supervisory Control for Power Quality Improvement of Multi-Area Microgrids

In this paper, the power quality (PQ) improvement of multi-area microgrids (MAMGs) is addressed. To this aim, mitigation of voltage harmonics and unbalance is considered by using distributed generators (DGs) and active power filters (APFs) in a proper way. As a novel approach, the main goal of the proposed method is to pick out redundant APFs and/or significantly reduce of DGs and APFs compensation workload by making collaboration between areas toward integrated PQ improvement of the MAMG. To achieve the desired PQ indices of different areas, supervisory control is planned for proper utilization of available compensators in time. By supervisory control, harmonic propagation between areas and the system unbalance are dealt with and systemic PQ improvement of the MAMG is provided. To this aim, scheduling framework is used to track the PQ situation of each area. Evaluation of the proposed control is carried out by a comprehensive simulation study in MATLAB/Simulink.