Optimum Communication Network Design for Distributed Secondary Voltage Control in Microgrids

In this paper, a two-layered cooperative voltage control using droop controller in primary layer and a distributed voltage regulation in the secondary layer is utilized for microgrid control purposes. The focus of this paper is on secondary voltage control in which an Average Consensus Algorithm (ACA) is used and applied on a network of agents with an optimally designed network based on communication cost and graph connectivity (GC). The main purpose of the ACA is to keep the average voltage of key buses at a desired level during islanding. This algorithm, along with the primary control, enables microgrids to maintain voltage stability as well as voltage quality by smoothing the voltage profile. To evaluate the proposed control strategy, a system consisting of 3 pilot nodes (key buses) is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. The results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed average voltage control approach.