PhD Student Eric Silk with Advisor A. Domínguez -García

As distributed energy resources (DERs) continue to see increased utilization in the modern grid, the use of distributed controls becomes increasingly necessary for their operation.  A promising family of algorithms are known as consensus algorithms – in particular, we rely heavily on Ratio Consensus (RC) and Min-Max Consensus (MMC).

The goal of this project is to develop a software framework for the control of microgrids using these consensus algorithms, while maintaining their security and reliability in spite of errors and malicious activities.  My contributions thus far have been the application of modern software design principles to produce a generic, platform-agnostic implementation in C++ as well as a Python based implementation for rapid prototyping and research uses.  Current targets are principally Raspberry Pi single board computers (SBC’s) with the intent to communicate to hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) power systems simulators and real-world systems.  To achieve the stated goals, we have developed and implemented an algorithm for online error-checking that requires intermittent information from a small subset of devices in the network.

Future work will include investigating the effect of communication graph structure on error detection, convergence properties, extensions and generalization of the error checking scheme, and security studies involving red- and blue-teaming exercises.

This work is funded by the Department of Energy’s CyDERMS project.

Figure 29. Raspberry Pi Control Nodes.

Figure 30. Typhoon HIL Real-time Digital Simulators.