Finite time protocols for multi-agent control of Distributed Generation and Responsive Loads

Distributed Resources in the Smart Grid, such as Distributed Generation (DG) and Responsive Loads (RL) are capable of providing a wide range of ancilliary services, if properly coordinated. However, because of their large numbers and distributed nature, using a fully centralized communication structure to achieve coordination can be prohibitive, due to scale and cost. Decentralized approaches based on multi-agent systems theory have been proposed and are focused on linear consensus algorithms that asymptotically converge to a cooperative solution. In this paper, an alternative approach, which converges in a finite number of steps is formulated. The protocol is based on linear iterative updates and known observability results from graph structured linear systems. Here, the protocol is also modified to address a generalized cooperation problem in the context of DG/RL coordination. Furthermore, the protocol is modified to reduce the number of operations per step, ensuring that it is applicable to a large scale grid, which is usually the case in practice. The applicability of the approach is verified through simulations, for the case of grid voltage support through Distributed Generation.