Agent-based intelligent control for real-time operation of a microgrid

This paper presents an intelligent agent-based control for real-time operation of a hybrid microgrid in both islanded and interconnected modes. The proposed control architecture contains different types of agents such as Photovoltaic agent, Fuel cell agent, Distributed Generator agent, Power Converter Building Block agent, Composite Energy Storage System agent and Load agent, which represent each major components in the microgrid. In this paper, the control system implementation will be discussed in details by describing each agent´s and the control algorithm associated with ontology creation. The proposed control system is developed as a Multi Agent System (MAS) in JADE platform and the microgrid is implemented in Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS). A real-time communication interface between MAS and RTDS is presented via TCP/IP. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control architecture, simulation studies have been performed on the developed hybrid microgrid. The simulation results indicate that the proposed agent-based control system effectively coordinates the distributed energy resources in real-time for operation of both islanded and grid connected modes.