Laboratorial Microgrid Emulation Based on Distributed Control Architecture

Power systems worldwide are complex and challenging environments. The increasing necessity for an adequate integration of renewable energy sources is resulting in a rising complexity in power systems operation. Multiagent based simulation platforms have proven to be a good option to study the several issues related to these systems. This paper presents an emulation of a laboratorial microgrid based on distributed control architecture. The proposed model contains real consumption and generation resources, including consumer load, photovoltaic, and wind turbine emulator. Also, a web-based graphical interface has been designed in order to monitor and control the microgrid. In this system, there are four main agents, which are connected by means of a communication network capable of sharing and exchanging information to achieve the overall system’s goal. The performance of the distributed architecture is demonstrated in order to observe the applicability of the agents and their collaboration abilities. The results of the paper show in practice that how a distributed control based microgrid manages its resources, and how it reacts if there is a fault or no activity on them.This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 641794 (project DREAMGO) and from FEDER Funds through COMPETE program and from National Funds through FCT, under the project UID/EEA/00760/2013