A Hardware-in-the-Loop Real-Time Testbed for Microgrid Hierarchical Control

To maintain a stable, flexible and economic operation of a microgrid, hierarchical control architecture consisting of primary, secondary and tertiary control is proposed. However, the differences in dynamics of microgrid, bandwidths of control levels and speed of communication channels make it difficult to comprehensively validate the performance of the hierarchical control schemes. In this paper we propose a hardware-in-the-loop real-time testbed for microgrid hierarchical control. The proposed testbed can be used to validate control performance under different microgrid operating modes (grid-tied or islanded), different primary control schemes (current or voltage mode) and different secondary control approaches (centralized or distributed). The integration of industry-grade hardware that runs primary and secondary control into the testbed allows for complete emulation of microgrid operation, and facilitates the study of the effects of measurement noise, sampling and communication delays.