Economic & Reliable DC Microgrids

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) environment for DC microgrids, composed of interrelated agents equipped with cyber capabilities, have enabled energy resources and loads to perform dangerous tasks with augmented capabilities. It is desired to develop efficient control and reliable scheduling strategies for CPSs to obviate system failures and provide scalable CPSs. To employ power buffers to decouple volatile loads and a low-inertia distribution network, distributed intelligent control policies for DC microgrids will be developed to enable power buffers to assist each other during abrupt load changes reciprocally. An actor-critic structure will be designed with critics approximating the optimal value function and actors learning the distributed optimal controller. The resulting control law can be optimized online and triggered at each load change, making the proposed approach particularly suitable for safety-critical devices. Furthermore, modeling adversaries and analyzing their threat levels empower agents with appropriate mitigation mechanisms to foresee potential threatening circumstances. On this basis, the misbehaviour of connected converters is detected using self-belief and trust metrics to minimize the propagation of compromised data, where the trustworthiness of incoming information is calculated at each converter with a trust-based distributed controller. This project includes rigorous theoretical studies and extensive verifications on designing resilient and high-confidence control protocols for multi-agent CPSs with applications to DC microgrids. In addition, the proposed Economic and Reliable DC Microgrid (ERDCM) project management scheme will ensure efficient delivery of the proposed project, including research, training, dissemination, and exploitation. At the end of this project, the Fellow will become an international research leader with research profiles, academic/international links, and interpersonal skills largely enhanced.