Gossip-based distributed active load voltage control for low-voltage microgrids

The focus of this paper presents a distributed control method based on the gossip communication mechanism that will regulate the voltage of active loads in islanded microgrids. The proposed distributed voltage control (DVC) strategy based on the gossip protocols is fully distributed and by the way of the discrete-time communication; moreover, each active load unit only requires the local voltage and current measurement from its own and some nearest neighbors (but not all) for the voltage control by using low-bandwidth communication links and the gossip communication protocol is used to update the control inputs to restore the voltage magnitudes of critical load to remain a desired values. Better control results can be obtained through gossip communication and local control which thus meets the plug-and-play feature of microgrid power systems. The effectiveness of the proposed control methodology is verified by the simulation of an islanded microgrid in MATLAB/SimPowerSystems.