A power electronics communication protocol for distributed digital control architectures

This paper presents a distributed control system architecture for power electronics conversion systems. Control partitioning is described and a two-level control hierarchy is proposed. Specifically, a hardware manager-controlling the actual power conversion process-, and an application manager, hardware independent Universal Controller are introduced and implemented. A detailed description of these controllers is given using a voltage-source inverter as test system. Additionally, a high-speed real-time protocol (PESNet) is introduced for communication purposes of the proposed distributed control architecture. The synchronous nature of the protocol is described in addition to its data types and commands. From the analysis presented the usage of such an architecture and controllers for reconfigurable zonal distribution systems becomes apparent.