Time-Sensitive Cooperative Distributed Energy Management on Cyber-Physical Energy Systems

The next generation power system is a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) with a large number of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Advanced technologies in power electronics and communications networks give the system operator much more flexibility to operate the grid. In contrast, a large number of geographically distributed controllable devices also raise a new challenge for the power system engineers, that is, to design scalable algorithms that can manage the electrical power in a large-scale cyber-physical energy system. The conventional Energy Management System (EMS) with a control center may not be able to handle the massive amount of data flow while making time-sensitive decisions for this type of largescale networked control system. Cooperative distributed algorithms have shown great potential in solving the control problem on large-scale systems. By selecting the incremental cost of each generation unit as the consensus variable, the Incremental Cost Consensus (ICC) algorithm is able to solve the conventional centralized economic dispatch problem in a distributed manner. The results of representative case studies have been discussed to show that the difference between network topologies will influence the convergence rate of the ICC algorithm. Related topics such as leader election criterion, algorithm performance under communication time-delay and the convergence rate analysis have been discussed. Two extended versions of ICC algorithm as been introduced. The Asynchronous ICC algorithm uses gossip-based communication protocol; the global clock synchronization among each agent is not required in this version. The leaderless ICC uses another consensus network to estimate the global power demand and solve the Economic Dispatch Problem in a distributed fashion. We have shown that steady-state solutions of these systems are equal to a centralized solution of the EDP.