Distributed Agent Consensus-Based Optimal Resource Management for Microgrids

This paper considers the optimal resource management problem for microgrids. Microgrids provide a promising approach to fulfil challenges of the integration of distributed renewable generations and energy storage systems. However, the resource management in a microgrid encounters the new difficulty, i.e., supply–demand imbalance, caused by the intermittence of renewable sources. Therefore, an optimal solution is proposed to the resource management by enhancing the communication and coordination under a multiagent system framework. An agent is a participant, for instance, the distributed renewable generator/energy storage system of the microgrid. With this multiagent system, the distributed optimal solution only utilizes the local information, and interacts with the neighboring agents. Thus, single-node congestion is avoided since the requirement for a central control center is eliminated, and it is robust against single-link/node failures. The analysis will show that the proposed solution can solve the resource management problem in an initialization-free manner. Additionally, the proposed strategy can maintain the supply–demand balance under a time-varying supply–demand deviation. The simulation studies are carried out for IEEE 14-bus and 162-bus power systems to validate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed solution.