Author:

Keywords:

Science & Technology, Technology, Energy & Fuels, peer-to-peer, distributed control, device-to-device communication, voltage control, experimentation, SMART TRANSACTIVE ENERGY, HOME-MICROGRIDS, POWER, NETWORK, OPTIMIZATION, GENERATORS, FRAMEWORK, 02 Physical Sciences, 09 Engineering, 33 Built environment and design, 40 Engineering, 51 Physical sciences

Abstract:

This paper presents experimental validation of a distributed optimization-based voltage control system. The dual-decomposition method is used in this paper to solve the voltage optimization problem in a fully distributed way. Device-to-device communication is implemented to enable peer-to-peer data exchange between agents of the proposed voltage control system. The paper presents the design, development and hardware setup of a laboratory-based testbed used to validate the performance of the proposed dual-decomposition-based peer-to-peer voltage control. The architecture of the setup consists of four layers: microgrid, control, communication, and monitoring. The key question motivating this research was whether distributed voltage control systems are a technically effective alternative to centralized ones. The results discussed in this paper show that distributed voltage control systems can indeed provide satisfactory regulation of the voltage profiles.