Design of a Power System Supervisory Control with Linear Optimization for Electrical Load Management in an Aircraft On-Board DC Microgrid

Abstract

In modern aircraft, energy supply management has become a critical matter, since many aboard electrical loads have to be supplied, especially those related to flight safety. However, at the same time, the size and weight of electrical generators must be limited because of their on-board installation. In this paper, the Mixed Integrated Linear Programming (MILP) methodology has been used to formulate the Supervisor definition of the direct current (DC) microgrid (MG) on-board system with an extension for the programmable loads. Due to the problem of dimension increase, two methods have been presented and tested to perform optimal energy management (EM) aboard an aircraft: the Branch and Bound (B&B) and the Linear Regression Approximation (LRA). Finally, numerical simulations and results have been provided to validate the proposed optimization methodologies, according to the dimensions and the complexity of the problem.