Consensus-Based Demand-Side Participation in Smart Microgrid Emergency Operation

Recent research works have demonstrated that providing ancillary services for future microgrids is a challenging task due to the lack of sufficient spinning reserves and high cost of storage devices. Therefore, an increasing attention has been given to demand response (DR) as an emerging source to provide the required reserve, especially in emergency operation of the system. This paper proposes a decentralized multi-agent based DR strategy to control the domestic demands during the emergency operation of the microgrid (MG). According to the proposed multi-agent based DR strategy, the domestic loads are grouped based on a predefined priority and are assigned to specific load agents. To implement the information sharing process among the load agents, the consensus strategy is used. Communications among the load agents as a challenging issue of multi-agent systems (MAS) is considered and the effect of communication time delay is investigated. Simulation studies have been carried out on the CIGRE benchmark microgrid with various microsources and domestic loads, showing the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized control scheme.