A Local Voting Protocol Based Cooperative DC Community Microgrids

Under the conventional schemes, the battery management systems are usually designed from the system operator’s perspective aligning them with common modes of operation to either ensure the longevity of each battery or an economically viable option. However, in DC microgrids with the batteries reinforced by local investments of each customer, their operation is primarily governed by the consumers’ preferences. To support this feature, this paper introduced a local voting scheme using a binary distributed protocol based power management strategy for an autonomous network of PV-battery based cooperative DC community microgrid, allowing each customer to vote to undergo either energy balancing or load sharing between the batteries in a distributed manner based on their respective future usage. Moreover, it manifests these objectives using a voting index based on majority & emergency events which is used to resolve the system operation. The proposed control strategy is simulated to demonstrate its effectiveness for various voting scenarios under physical disturbances such as communication delay, link failure, converter failure & data packet loss and experimentally validated on a 600 W FPGA based experimental prototype.