Optimal Decentralized Coordination of Voltage-Controlled Sources in Islanded Microgrids

The recent amalgamation of advanced communication and actuation capabilities into power entities is fundamental for enabling the design of an adaptive, efficient and resilient power grid. In this paper, we focus specifically on optimal and decentralized microgrid coordination that accounts for steady-state physical grid constraints. Actuating agents representing voltage-controlled distributed energy resources (DERs) in the microgrid exchange information with one another to iteratively compute the optimal local voltage set point. In order to account for physical inter dependencies in the microgrid in a tractable manner, a transformation is applied to the three-phase abc representation of voltage and current to the synchronously rotating dq frame of reference. Resulting linear steady-state voltage and current equations allow for the decomposition of the optimal coordination problem that can be solved by every actuating agent in a highly granular manner. Theoretical and practical studies highlight the effective performance of the proposed algorithm.