Distributed Economic Dispatch in a Microgrid Using Proportional-Integral Consensus

With the increasing penetration of distributed generators, distributed algorithms have become essential for efficient power system operations. However, these algorithms are often vulnerable to noise and communication delays due to their dependence on communication infrastructures. A consensus-based decentralized method is presented in this paper to solve economic dispatch in microgrids, accounting for practical communication challenges such as dynamically switching topologies, communication delays, and noise. A proportional-integral (PI) consensus protocol is proposed to address these issues, which includes an integral term to mitigate the harmful effects of noise and delays. The multi-agent system (MAS) model is used to describe the microgrid. A distributed PI consensus approach with two primary consensus variables—the global power imbalance (∆P ) and the incremental cost (λ)—is employed to solve the economic dispatch problem. A key benefit of this method is that it allows generating units to maintain the confidentiality of their cost characteristics. The effectiveness of the presented approach is demonstrated by simulation results on a microgrid with five buses.