Application of intelligent agent systems for real-time coordination of power converters (RCPC) in microgrids

Abstract

This paper presents results of a study to determine the most appropriate agent based architecture for implementation of controllers for stand-alone microgrids. The controller has to perform these main tasks: maintaining sufficient system voltage during supply overload conditions, balancing load flow, and managing voltage level in case of failure of some converters, or adding new converters to a system bus. The paper proposes application of agent technology in achieving of each aforementioned controller actions and Real-time Coordination of Power Converters (RCPC) in microgrids. The paper compares system complexity using numerical analysis of different distributed lookup algorithms based on defined metric values. The results aid in choosing publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model over distributed hash table (DHT) infrastructure as the most efficient and scalable solution of developing agent technology for the RCPC system. To test the applicability of the RCPC optimization method, a sample DC shipboard microgrid including 32 converters is used as a case study.

A Novel Locality Algorithm and Peer-to-Peer Communication Infrastructure for Optimizing Network Performance in Smart Microgrids

“…Message counts are considered as a metric value for communication overhead [60] and can provide evidence about the network and the bandwidth usage, as well as about the end-to-end latencies. O(logn) and O(n) indicators depict the worst case scenario for n nodes in the network.…”

Real-time distributed coordination of power electronic converters for optimization of DC shipboard distribution systems

“…The objective of EDP is to schedule the committed generating units output so as to meet the required load demand at minimum cost satisfying all unit and system operational constraints. EDP problem can be generally expressed as: 2 where a, b, c are constants…”

“…4. Transmission loss of the microgrid can be expressed as: 2 Here I 1 is the load of Zone1, I 2 of Zone2, I 5 of pulsed load. I 4 is the maximum charging/discharging current of ESS and I 3 is the maximum allowed cross-tie [inter-bus] current.…”

“…Communication design of intelligent agent systems for real-time coordination of power converters in microgrid has been extensively discussed in [2]. The authors have highlighted and compared among several methods like Belief-Desire Intention, Facilitator Agent, Publish/Subscribe Technology.…”

“…Coordination of converters for any purpose must be performed such that the microgrid stability margin is maintained. [1] [2][3] [4] Converters can be coordinated centrally or in a distributed fashion. Centralized control is vulnerable to single points of failure.…”