A Decentralized Architecture Based on Cooperative Dynamic Agents for Online Voltage Regulation in Smart Grids

Abstract

The large-scale integration of renewable power generators in power grids may cause complex technical issues, which could hinder their hosting capacity. In this context, the mitigation of the grid voltage fluctuations represents one of the main issues to address. Although different control paradigms, based on both local and global computing, could be deployed for online voltage regulation in active power networks, the identification of the most effective approach, which is influenced by the available computing resources, and the required control performance, is still an open problem. To face this issue, in this paper, the mathematical backbone, the expected performance, and the architectural requirements of a novel decentralized control paradigm based on dynamic agents are analyzed. Detailed simulation results obtained in a realistic case study are presented and discussed to prove the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method.

Decentralized Smart Grid Voltage Control by Synchronization of Linear Multiagent Systems in the Presence of Time-Varying Latencies

“…, n l ). As in [25], the objective function to be minimized takes into account both technical and economic aspects, and it is typically expressed as a weighted sum of O normalized design objectives:…”

“…All these limitations have stimulated the SG research in conceptualizing and developing new voltage control paradigms, which allow evolving the traditional centralized and hierarchical solutions toward decentralized and self-organizing architectures based on cooperative and adaptive control entities [15,16,25,26].…”

“…In doing so, the controlled SG can be seen as an IoT ecosystem (or cyber-physical System) [1,22,27], where the crucial challenge for the control is to guarantee a desired dynamic behavior for each single node while coordinating at the same time the overall behavior of the ensemble. In particular, [11,13,15,25,26,28] demonstrated that the MASs framework could play a strategic role in SGs voltage control, by promptly adapting the set-points of the distributed voltage controllers according to predefined control objectives. Anyway, selecting the most appropriate processing architecture for a MAS is not an easy task.…”

“…Indeed, in the SGs domain, the complex economic-driven dynamics of both loads and generators and the severe reliability requirements have been recently orienting research efforts toward the conceptualization of self-organizing and decentralized processing computing paradigms. In this context, one of the most promising enabling methodologies is based on the adoption of decentralized and self-organizing networks of dynamic agents equipped with consensus protocols [17,18,25,[29][30][31]. Although the solutions proposed in these papers allow effectively and reliably solving the voltage control problem, their deployment in realistic operation scenarios is still an open problem, which asks for further investigations.…”

“…To face this issue in this paper we propose a fully distributed and decentralized control architecture (see [25] and references therein for an overview the main advantages of the approach) that allows one to address the voltage regulation problem in a SG despite the presence of time-varying communication latencies. The proposed control architecture is funded on a network of N cooperative smart controllers, each one regulating the voltage magnitude of a specific bus (called a node too).…”