Application of intelligent agent systems for real-time coordination of power converters (RCPC) in microgrids

This paper presents results of a study to determine the most appropriate agent based architecture for implementation of controllers for stand-alone microgrids. The controller has to perform these main tasks: maintaining sufficient system voltage during supply overload conditions, balancing load flow, and managing voltage level in case of failure of some converters, or adding new converters to a system bus. The paper proposes application of agent technology in achieving of each aforementioned controller actions and Real-time Coordination of Power Converters (RCPC) in microgrids. The paper compares system complexity using numerical analysis of different distributed lookup algorithms based on defined metric values. The results aid in choosing publish/subscribe (pub/sub) model over distributed hash table (DHT) infrastructure as the most efficient and scalable solution of developing agent technology for the RCPC system. To test the applicability of the RCPC optimization method, a sample DC shipboard microgrid including 32 converters is used as a case study.