Distributed pinning droop control in isolated AC microgrids

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed communication-based droop control mechanism for accurate active and reactive power sharing in isolated converter-fed micro-grids(MG). Under this framework, the power converters and loads in the MG are regarded as multi-agent system (MAS). Then, one special MAS control, known as pinning control, is used as a secondary controller to improve the performance of the power sharing within the MG. Since only a fraction of the agents in the network have access to critical information, the overall communication bandwidth and control cost can be significantly reduced compared to the recently proposed consensus-based droop control techniques. Theoretical studies of this distributed pinning droop control will be presented in details. The prototype is tested by conducting extensive simulations of an existing MG in Taiwan. Simulations under normal system operations and several disturbances are developed in MATLAB/Simulink and the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) aiming to assess the correctness of the proposed pinning-control framework. Simulation results confirm the feasibility and the accuracy of the proposed distributed pinning droop control.