An ADMM-based Decentralized Voltage Management Mechanism for Distribution Networks

The rapid growth of decentralized energy resources (DERs) has created extensive opportunities to diversify the energy generation portfolio in an exponential rate. At the same time, these opportunities also introduce some essential challenges. One of these challenges is the voltage stability management in a distribution network such as Microgrids. To address this challenge, in this paper, we develop a decentralized voltage management mechanism in the form of an augmented optimal power flow (OPF) problem. In our work, the OPF problem is further decomposed and is solved by exploring the alternating method of multipliers (ADMM). Additionally, reactive power reserves (RPRs) are utilized to generate$/$inject the necessary reactive power at each bus to stabilize the voltage locally and to curb any possible disturbances in the voltage performance. Furthermore, in our work the impact of the communication delay caused by the decentralized management has been considered and mitigated. In this paper, a customized radial 9-bus single feeder distribution network has been used to demonstrate our work. The simulation results have been presented to illustrate the performance of our work.