Analysis of Effects of Communication Conditions on Distributed Secondary Control for DC Microgrids

Distributed control strategies based on consensus algorithms for DC microgrids have gained intensive interest in recent years thanks to its advantages of high reliability, resilience, and expandability, over centralized control ones. Thus, global information can be accurately shared in a distributed way by sharing information between neighbor units. Meanwhile, hierarchical control paradigm consisting of three levels, i.e., primary, secondary, and tertiary, has become a standard solution for DC microgrids. Usually, the primary control is performed locally without communication, while secondary and tertiary controls desire distributed communication to obtain average voltage or current among units. Thus, the sparse communications are crucial to distributed control of DC microgrids. In this work, three main communication conditions, i.e., link failure, communication delay, and noise are included in analyzing effects of these conditions on distributed control of DC microgrids. Simulation model is built to verify the analysis in MATLAB/Simulink environment.