Need-Based Communication in Fully-Distributed Secondary Control of DC Microgrids

Voltage regulation and current sharing are known as two main goals of DC microgrids. Distributed secondary control based on dynamic averaging consensus algorithm has been recently introduced in the literature as a viable solution. This approach, not only provides a good voltage regulation, but also guarantees load sharing will be done according to the nominal capacity of agents among the microgrids units. However, This solution is based on time-triggered communication that led to high communication burden by unnecessary data exchanging. In this paper, to prevent needless data-exchanging, the abovementioned distributed secondary controller is equipped with an event-triggered communication strategy. This need-based communication strategy reduces the communication load, considerably. The system stability analysis under the event-triggered strategy is evaluated using the Lyapunov's stability approach. The proposed strategy is applied to a DC microgrid and its performance is validated under communication disturbances and different working conditions using Simulink/ MATLAB environment.