Fully decentralised multi-agent hierarchical control of a hybrid AC-DC microgrid based on event-triggered consensus

Abstract

The continuous growth of distributed renewable energy resources in medium and low-voltage networks supports the case for a distributed architecture for electricity supply relying on microgrids. Whereas decentralised architectures for the primary and secondary control layers of the hierarchical control of microgrids have already been proposed, the tertiary control (economic dispatch) has been mainly formulated as a centralised control or as a distributed control that relies on a central agent to coordinate the operation between distributed generators. This paper proposes a fully decentralised hierarchical microgrid control based on a consensus-based economic dispatch problem. The proposed tertiary control layer is robust to communication delays. The secondary control layer applies an incremental formulation and considers the active-power limits of the generators. The robustness and performance of the proposed hierarchical control are compared with those of a conventional centralised approach and a previously published decentralised approach. The performance of the algorithms is validated using non-linear real-time simulations, and their stability is proved by modal analysis and using Lyapunov functions.