Distributed Control and Communication Strategies in Networked Microgrids

Networked microgrids (NMGs) provide a promising solution for accommodating various distributed energy resources (DERs) and enhancing the system performance in terms of reliability, resilience, flexibility, and energy efficiency. With the penetration of MGs, the communication-based distributed control is playing an increasingly important role in NMGs for coordinating a multitude of heterogeneous and spatially distributed DERs, which feature enhanced efficiency, reliability, resilience, scalability, and privacy-preserving as compared with conventional centralized control. This article aims to provide a comprehensive survey of distributed control and communication strategies in NMGs. We provide thorough discussions and elaborate on: 1) Essential merits of MGs and NMGs, and their practical implementations; 2) Distributed communication network characteristics and specific operation objectives of NMGs; 3) Classifications of distributed control strategies in NMGs and their salient features; 4) Communication reliability issues concerning data timeliness, data availability, and data accuracy, and the development of countermeasures; 5) Advancements in several promising communication and computation technologies and their potential applications in NMGs.