Development of a Universal Platform for Hardware In-the-Loop Testing of Microgrids

The operation of a microgrid becomes significantly complex with the high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs), demand-side management, market operation, and disconnection and reconnection to the utility grid. Therefore, development of advanced tools/platforms for testing operation and control of microgrid has attracted more and more attention nowadays. The current literature reveals that the microgrid's control and management are designed to be tested either in a numerical simulation approach, or only under a specific hardware device/experiment environment; they do not deal with a comprehensive platform capable of easily executing very complex applications built by composing required functionalities in a standardized, easy-to-use, and well-defined way. To address the problem of limited testing functions of existing tools/platforms, a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) approach, in particular combining a power-HIL (PHIL) and a signal-HIL (SHIL), is proposed in this paper. Such an approach is suitable for testing the system-level controller energy management systems (EMSs) and hardware controllers at signal level, as well as hardware devices like power converters at power level. Hence, this platform is designed for flexibility and universality. The HIL platform is presented in this work and its performance is demonstrated in a sample application.