Evaluation of Communication Infrastructures for Distributed Optimization of Virtual Power Plant Schedules

Abstract

With the transition towards renewable energy resources, the impact of small distributed generators (DGs) increases, leading to the need to actively stabilize distribution grids. DGs may be organized in virtual power plants (VPPs), where DGs’ schedules must be coordinated to enable the VPP to act as a single plant. One approach to solving this problem is using multi-agent systems (MAS) to offer autonomous, robust, and flexible control methods. The coordination of such systems requires communication between agents. The time required for this depends on communication characteristics, determined by the underlying communication infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate communication influences for the wireless technologies CDMA450 and LTE Advanced on the fully distributed optimization heuristic COHDA, which is used to perform optimized scheduling for a VPP. The use case under consideration is the adaptation of schedules to provide flexibility for regional congestion management for delivery on a regionalized ancillary service market (rAS). We investigate the scalability of the VPP and the effects of disturbances in the communication infrastructure. The results show that the optimization duration of COHDA can be influenced by the underlying communication infrastructure and that this optimization method is applicable to a limited extent for product delivery of rASs.