Optimal Efficient control of a Parallel Multi-Units System

This paper proposes a novel deterministic approach to efficiently control parallel multi-units systems (PMUS). The proposed approach consists of online and offline sub-controllers. The online controller can be implemented in both centralised or distributed approaches. It computes the reference load of each unit using Lookup tables. The latter are designed using an offline formulation through solving a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP). Besides its implementation simplicity, the proposed method can efficiently manage PMUS within a large unit number and can be applied for both identical or dissimilar characteristics system units. To analyse the performance of the proposed approach, simulations and case studies are carried out considering multi-unit power conversion systems. The obtained results highlight the proposed method’s superiority over classic control methods.