Distributed self-triggered secondary control for islanded microgrids

This paper develops a distributed secondary frequency/voltage controller via a self-triggered mechanism to solve a class of communication redundancy problems of islanded microgrids. Different from some existing distributed controllers with the event-triggered mechanism, the self-triggered controller designed in this brief effectively avoids continuous computations of trigger functions, where the next trigger instant can be predetermined through the calculation at the current trigger instant. Finally, the theoretical analysis and numerical simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed secondary controller. • A self-triggered control strategy is proposed for islanded microgrids in the secondary layer, in which a novel trigger condition is designed to deal with the problem of communication and computation redundancy. • Different from event-trigger-based controllers, the continuous calculation of trigger conditions is avoided according to the proposed self-triggered controller, in which a computing approach based on estimators is designed to predetermine the next trigger instant. The self-triggered mechanism achieves deterministic communication scheduling by precomputing triggering sequences, which eliminates channel contention risks inherent in event-triggered approaches. The comparison between the method proposed in this paper and those in other related papers (Wang et al. (2022), Andreotti et al. (2025), Roudnil et al. (2025)) is shown in Table 1.