Desong Bian

Xiren Zhou, Siqi Wang, Ruisheng Diao et al.

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach has shown promisein solving complex decision and control problems in power engineering domain.In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of DRL-based voltage control fromaspects of algorithm selection, state space representation, and reward engineering.To resolve observed issues, we propose a novel imitation learning-based approachto directly map power grid operating points to effective actions without any interimreinforcement learning process. The performance results demonstrate that theproposed approach has strong generalization ability with much less training time.The agent trained by imitation learning is effective and robust to solve voltagecontrol problem and outperforms the former RL agents.

Yimajian Yan, Di Shi, Desong Bian et al.

Distributed control, as a potential solution to decreasing communication demands in microgrids, has drawn much attention in recent years. Advantages of distributed control have been extensively discussed, while its impacts on microgrid performance and stability, especially in the case of communication latency, have not been explicitly studied or fully understood yet. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a generalized theoretical framework for small-signal stability analysis and performance evaluation for microgrids using distributed control. The proposed framework synthesizes generator and load frequency-domain characteristics, primary and secondary control loops, as well as the communication latency into a frequency-domain representation which is further evaluated by the generalized Nyquist theorem. In addition, various parameters and their impacts on microgrid dynamic performance are investigated and summarized into guidelines to help better design the system. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Di Shi, Xi Chen, Zhiwei Wang et al.

One critical value microgrids bring to power systems is resilience, the capability of being able to island from the main grid under certain conditions and connect back when necessary. Once islanded, a microgrid must be synchronized to the main grid before reconnection to prevent severe consequences. In general, synchronization of a single machine with the grid can be easily achieved using a synchronizer. The problem becomes more challenging when it comes to a multi-bus microgrid with multiple distributed generators (DGs) and dispersed loads. All distributed generators need to be properly controlled in a coordinated way to achieve synchronization. This paper presents a novel bi-level distributed cooperative control framework for a multi-bus microgrid. In this framework, DGs work collaboratively in a distributed manner using the minimum and sparse communication. The topology of the communication network can be flexible which supports the plug-and-play feature of microgrids. Fast and deterministic synchronization can be achieved with tolerance to communication latency. Experimental results obtained from Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.