Distributed agent-based coordinated control for microgrid management

Due to the ever-growing global concerns of climate changes and environmental issues, renewable energies along with the distributed energy resources (DERs) are becoming popular day by day for the sustainable operation of microgrids. Since a number of energy sources are connected to microgrids, multiple power electronic devices, such as inverters, are interfaced with those sources to support the DC–AC and AC–DC conversion. Multiple inverters installed with DERs are very effective in order to deliver adequate amount of energy from different sources to the end users. However, the control and management of multiple inverters adversely suffer from limited system stability due to the lack of proper coordination among different components of microgrids. Moreover, due to the requirements of sustainable operation of microgrids and intermittent characteristics of renewable energy, efficient coordinated control is still quite difficult to maintain the balance between the generations and demands. In order to deliver a reliable energy supply to microgrids, inverters need to be controlled in a more efficient way. Moreover, the integration of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) adds a new dimension to the reliable operation of microgrids which also possesses a difficulty to manage power sharing during the change in network configurations. In this chapter, a communication-assisted distributed multi-agent system (MAS)-based control scheme is proposed to effectively control and manage the inverter-dominated microgrids with solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and BESSs. The MAS establishes the coordination between the power sharing and energy management through agent communication and further ensures the sustainable operation of microgrids by effectively controlling the inverters.