Dissipativity-Based Distributed Droop-Free Controller and Communication Topology Co-Design for DC Microgrids

This paper presents a novel dissipativity-based distributed droop-free control approach for the voltage regulation problem in DC microgrids (MGs) comprised of an interconnected set of distributed generators (DGs), loads, and power lines. First, we describe the closed-loop DC MG as a networked system where the sets of DGs and lines (i.e., subsystems) are interconnected via a static interconnection matrix. This interconnection matrix demonstrates how the inputs and outputs of DGs and lines are connected with each other. Each DG has a local controller and a distributed global controller. To design the distributed global controllers, we use the dissipativity properties of the subsystems and formulate a linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem. To support the feasibility of this distributed global controller design, we identify a set of necessary local conditions, which we then enforce in a specifically developed LMI-based local controller design process. In contrast to existing DC MG control solutions that separate distributed controller and communication topology design problems, our approach proposes a unified framework for distributed controller and communication topology co-design. As the co-design process is LMI-based, it can be efficiently implemented and evaluated using existing software tools. The effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of voltage regulation and current sharing is verified by simulating an islanded DC MG in a MATLAB/Simulink environment under different scenarios, such as load changes and topological constraint changes, and comparing its performance with the recent droop control approach.