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In this article, a distributed hierarchical control framework with coordinated secondary and tertiary levels is proposed for islanded microgrids (MGs). The structure and functionality of each agent are formulated to process simultaneously the secondary control and TC in a peer-to-peer communication network. First, the distributed secondary control is proposed for restoring system frequency/voltage while providing power sharing considering droop coefficients and upper level power dispatch orders. Then the distributed TC minimizes the network power loss in the islanded MG by using alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. The multiagent system is designed to cover both control levels for cyber–physical implementations. A laboratory cyber–physical MG platform has been built to validate the proposed control framework in real-time and hardware-in-the-loop conditions. A six-bus three-DG MG is implemented on the platform and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed control and optimization strategies are a promising alternative approach to centralized control within microgrids. In this paper, a multi-agent system is developed to deal with the distributed secondary control of islanded microgrids. Two main challenges are identified in the coordination of a microgrid: (i) interoperability among equipment from different vendors; and (ii) online re-configuration of the network in the case of alteration of topology. To cope with these challenges, the agents are designed to communicate with physical devices via the industrial standard IEC 61850 and incorporate a plug and play feature. This allows interoperability within a microgrid at agent layer as well as allows for online re-configuration upon topology alteration. A test case of distributed frequency control of islanded microgrid with various scenarios was conducted to validate the operation of proposed approach under controller and power hardware-in-the-loop environment, comprising prototypical hardware agent systems and realistic communications network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]