Distributed Control in Hybrid AC-DC Microgrids Based on a Hybrid MCSA-ADMM Algorithm

This paper proposes an effective framework for optimal operation management of hybrid AC-DC microgrids incorporating both dispatchable and non-dispatchable energy sources as well as battery storage. The proposed method is constructed based on a fully distributed consensus-based structure making use of a multi-agent mechanism and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed framework decomposes the microgrid into several agents within which the neighboring agents share the consensus variable (mismatch power flow) with each other. Each agent tries to minimize its own cost based on the consensus variable value received from the other agents. An augmented objective function is then formulated which is nonlinear and needs to be optimized. Due to the high nonlinearity of the objective function, a new optimization method based on crow search algorithm (CSA) is developed to find the optimal local solutions for each agent and drive the ADMM to have a mature convergence. A modified method based on crossover and mutation operators is introduced to increase the search ability of CSA. The performance of the proposed framework is assessed using a typical hybrid AC-DC microgrid with distributed energy resources. The simulation results show the high efficacy of the proposed method in comparison with other methods.