Distributed Multiagent-Oriented Average Control for Voltage Restoration and Reactive Power Sharing of Autonomous Microgrids

Abstract

This paper addresses the voltage restoration and reactive power sharing problem of an autonomous microgrid with inverter-based distributed generations (DGs). A two-layer distributed average control scheme employing a multiagent system (MAS)-based finite-time consensus protocol has been proposed to control for autonomous microgrids, where each DG need merely information exchanges via a sparse communication. Accordingly, the proposed distributed average control strategy can be implemented locally for voltage restoration and reactive power sharing by the local communication among DGs. Due to the proposed distributed controllers implemented on local DGs, no central controller is required. Inspired by techniques from the MAS-based finite-time consensus algorithm, the global sharing information (i.e., total voltage deviation and total reactive power deficiency of the microgrid) can be accurately guaranteed in a distributed way. Depending on the discovered global information, the cooperative distributed average voltage control strategy, which involves primary and secondary voltage control, is not only executed to achieve a cooperative average voltage recovery but also ensures accurately reactive power sharing for each local DG and brings some advantages, such as plug-and-play property. Moreover, graph discovery algorithm is employed to achieve the self-expanding microgrids. Simulation results on an autonomous system are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in the MATLAB/SimPowerSystems Toolbox.

Keywords

• Distributed average control
• multiagent system
• finite-time consensus algorithm
• voltage regulation
• reactive power sharing
• autonomous microgrid