Software-Defined Microgrid Control: The Genesis of Decoupled Cyber-Physical Microgrids

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Nowadays, microgrid controllers are often embedded in specialized hardware such as PLC and DSP. The hardware-dependency and fit-and-forget design make it difficult and costly for microgrid controllers to evolve and upgrade under frequent changes such as plug-and-play of microgrid components. Furthermore, different distributed energy resources in a microgrid require customized controllers, leading to long development cycles and high operational costs for deploying microgrid services. To tackle the challenges, a software-defined control SDC) architecture for microgrid is devised, which virtualizes traditionally hardware-dependent microgrid control functions as software services decoupled from the underlying hardware infrastructure, fully resolving hardware dependence issues and enabling unprecedentedly low costs. A generic SDC prototype is designed to generate microgrid controllers autonomously in edge computing facilities such as distributed virtual machines. Extensive experiments verify that SDC outperforms traditional hardware-based microgrid control in that it empowers a decoupled cyber-physical microgrid and thus makes microgrid operations unprecedentedly affordable, autonomic, and secure.