Voltage/Frequency Regulation With Optimal Load Dispatch in Microgrids Using SMC Based Distributed Cooperative Control

Majority of the contemporary hierarchical control strategies for microgrids are either centralized or distributed, relying on leader-follower (or master-slave) consensus for secondary frequency and/or voltage regulation. Thus, in either case, these strategies are susceptible to single-point-failure (SPF). This potential research gap motivated the authors to propose a distributed three-layered hierarchical control strategy applicable to droop-controlled islanded AC microgrids. The proposed strategy can simultaneously ensure (i) frequency and voltage regulation of DGs within the prescribed frequency and voltage deviation limits as per IEC 60034-1 standard (i.e., ±2% and ±5%, respectively) without relying on leader-follower consensus at the secondary level, (ii) distributed economic dispatch of active power with minimum error, and (iii) distributed reactive power dispatch with plausible error. The proposed technique is fully distributed and shares the computation and communication burden among the neighboring nodes using a sparse communication network, thus, it is insusceptible to SPF. The feasibility of the proposed technique is guaranteed through various time-domain based numerical simulations executed in Matlab/Simulink under different loading conditions and microgrid expansion.