Fully-Distributed Gossip Control for Voltage Regulation of Inverter-based DRs in P2P Microgrids

Abstract

This paper focuses on a fully-distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) control scheme for voltage restoration and reactive power sharing of multiple inverter-based distributed energy resources (DRs) in AC microgrids (MG). The proposed distributed gossip control (DGC) strategy is P2P fully distributed enabled through the discrete-time communication; moreover, each DR only requires local voltage and current measurement from its own and some (but not all) nearest neighbors for the voltage and reactive power sharing control by using low-bandwidth communication links. The gossip communication protocol is used to update the control inputs to not only restore the voltage magnitudes of critical load points to a desired value, but also ensures accurate reactive power sharing for each local smart load. Having the proposed distributed controllers implemented on local DRs, no central controller is any longer required bringing about several advantages, e.g., plug-and-play property. Simulation studies in a MG network of MATLAB/SimPowerSystems demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed control strategy.