IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 7, NO.

1, JANUARY 2016 3

A Decentralized Hierarchical Control Structure and

Self-Optimizing Control Strategy for F-P Type
DGs in Islanded Microgrids
Huanhai Xin, Member, IEEE, Rui Zhao, Leiqi Zhang, Zhen Wang, Member, IEEE,
Kit Po Wong, Fellow, IEEE, and Wei Wei

Abstract—A decentralized and self-optimizing control strategy

is proposed for the frequency-power droop type distributed gen-
erators (DGs). The main characteristics of the proposed control
strategy are the following: 1) it is hierarchical and fully decen-
tralized, i.e., the functions of primary, secondary and tertiary
frequency control can be realized locally, with the microgrid
centralized controller making communication networks unneces-
sary and 2) it can make DGs share loads according to the equal
incremental principle. Simulation results verify the effectiveness
of the proposed control strategy.
Index Terms—Decentralized, frequency-power droop, hierar-
chical, power-frequency droop, self-optimizing.
I. I NTRODUCTION
N A microgrid, most distributed generators (DGs) are
I usually based on voltage source (VS) converter, and the
control of DGs can be generally classified into two basic types
according to the manners in which they support the microgrid.
1) Frequency-Power Droop Type (F-P Type): The DGs of
this type usually operate as current sources (CS), and
they support the microgrid via an F-P type control strat-
egy, as shown in Fig. 1(a). Namely, the active power
of the converter is controlled according to the measured
frequency. Typical applications of this control strategy
include photovoltaic generators and energy storage in
CS modes.
2) Power-Frequency Droop Type (P-F Type): The DGs of
this type usually operate as VSs, and they support the
microgrid using a P-F type control strategy, as shown
in Fig. 1(b). Namely, the converter is controlled to form
the frequency according to the measured power output
directly.
Note that the concepts of F-P type and P-F type are respec-
tively similar to those of “grid-supporting-grid-feeding” and
Manuscript received February 10, 2015; revised June 21, 2015; accepted
August 3, 2015. Date of publication September 16, 2015; date of current
version December 19, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National
High Technology Research and Development Program of China under Grant
2015AA050202, and in part by the National Nature Science Foundation of
China under Grant 51177146 and 51577168. Paper no. PESL-00031-2015.
H. Xin, R. Zhao, L. Zhang, Z. Wang, and W. Wei are with the Department
of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China
(e-mail: xinhh@zju.edu.cn; z.wang@zju.edu.cn).
K. P. Wong is with the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer
Engineering, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA 6009, Australia.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2015.2473096
1949-3053 c 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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Fig. 1. Types of DGs control. (a) F-P type DG. (b) P-F type DG.
“grid-supporting-grid-forming” proposed in [1]. However, the
former focuses more on control concept, and conventional syn-
chronous machines are obviously of F-P type even though they
are grid-forming generators.
The DGs with both F-P and P-F types in a microgrid
are generally hierarchically controlled by a microgrid central-
ized controller (MGCC) to balance the power of DGs and
the loads [2], and to make the microgrid operate in a cost-
effective way [3]. However, the MGCC seriously relies on
communication and the whole control structure becomes very
complicated. To address this issue, a fully distributed control
strategy is proposed in [4] for P-F type DGs, which can make
all DGs share loads according to their costs.
Nonetheless, the control strategy in [4] cannot work for
those F-P type DGs due to its lacking of power control
reference. To overcome this weakness, a novel decentralized
and self-optimizing control strategy is proposed here for the
droop control chain of the F-P type DGs in Fig. 1(a), while
the classic double-loop control strategy is used for the current
control chain. An illustration of the proposed control strategy
is presented in Fig. 2, which mainly includes two parts: 1) the
hierarchical frequency control (HFC) and 2) frequency track-
ing control (FTC). The control structure is hierarchical and
the control strategy has two distinct characteristics: 1) DG’s
active power can converge to the optimal operation point, i.e.,
DGs have self-optimizing function and 2) no communication
or MGCC is needed.
II. D ESCRIPTION OF THE C ONTROL S TRATEGY
A. Hierarchical Frequency Control
The HFC includes three parts: 1) the decentralized primary
control (DPC); 2) the decentralized secondary control (DSC);
4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 7, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016
Fig. 2. Proposed control strategy for DG in CS mode.
and 3) the decentralized tertiary control (DTC). The control
law, shown in Fig. 1, can be expressed as
 
fi,obj = fpri (Pi ) + fsec α, fi,obj /(1 + T2 s)
+ fter (β, Pi , λi (Pi ))/(1 + T3 s) (1)
where fi,obj is the objective frequency, Pi is the active power of
the ith DG; T2 and T3 are the time constants of two low-pass
filters; fpri (Pi ), fsec (α, fi,obj ), and fter (β, Pi , λi (Pi )) are
fpri (Pi ) = fmax − di Pi (2)
   
fsec α, fi,obj = α fnom − fi,obj (3)
fter (β, Pi , λi (Pi )) = fmax − di Si βλi (Pi ) − fpri (4)
where di = ( fmax − fmin )/Si , fnom is the nominal frequency,
fmax and fmin are the frequency limits, Si is the apparent power
capacity, and α and β are the gain and coefficient of the DSC
and DTC, respectively. λi (Pi ) denotes the cost incremental
value (CIV) function, which is the derivative function of the
ith DG’s cost and usually is an increasing function [5].
The DPC is a conventional linear droop control architecture
and has good dynamics by choosing appropriate parameters.
The DSC is designed to make the objective frequency close to
nominal frequency by choosing an appropriate α. The DTC is
a nonlinear droop control considering the CIV of DGs. Note
that if the microgrid frequency can track the objective fre-
quency (which is achieved by a tracking control below), the
DTC can make all DGs operate at the equal incremental prin-
ciple (EIP) point, i.e., in steady state each DG’s CIV will
be equal and as a result the total cost of the microgrid is
minimized [4], [5]. The two low-pass filters are designed to
decouple the dynamics of the DPC, DSC, and DTC, similar
to those in [4], such that the fast dynamics and steady state
of the microgrid are determined by (2) and (4), respectively.
B. Frequency Tracking Control
The FTC is composed of two parts: 1) the feedback control
and 2) the feedforward control.
The feedback control law is a proportional-integral (PI)
control as follows:
 sidered: 1) at t = 30 s, the load increases to 3.0 MW and 2) at
   
Pback
i,ref = K f
P i,obj − f i,meas + KI fi,obj − fi,meas dt (5)
where fi,meas is the microgrid measured frequency and
KP and KI are the parameters of the PI controller.
Note that the feedback control acts only when the devia-
tion between fi,obj and fi,meas is detected, so the time delay is
TABLE I
C OEFFICIENTS OF DG S ’ CIV F UNCTIONS
(a) (b)
Fig. 3. Simulation case. (a) Microgrid topology. (b) CIV curves of DGs.
inevitable. To accelerate the response, the feedforward control
law is designed as follows:
 
Pforward
i,ref = Si − KfP fi,meas − fmin (6)
where KfP = Si /( fmax − fmin ). Thus, the active power ref-
erence for the current control in Fig. 1 can be calculated
from (5) and (6)
Pi,ref = Pback
i,ref + Pi,ref .
forward
(7)
The FTC can make the microgrid frequency track the objec-
tive frequency via PI control, so all the DGs can operate at
the EIP point mentioned above.
Note that the DPC, DSC, and DTC are fully decentralized,
so the proposed control strategy can exhibit self-optimizing
function without communication or MGCC.
III. S IMULATION V ERIFICATION
An islanded microgrid with the topology shown in
Fig. 3(a) is considered for simulation study, in which three
1 MW F-P type DGs (Nos. 1, 3, and 5) use the proposed con-
trol strategy to control the active power, and the reactive power
is controlled by the conventional V-Q droop control in [1]. The
other two 1 MW P-F type DGs (Nos. 2 and 4) adopt the control
strategy in [4] to provide the frequency and voltage support for
the microgrid. The system parameters are as follows: T2 = 2 s,
T3 = 2.5 s, α = 20, β = 1/3, fnom = 50 Hz, fmin = 49 Hz,
fmax = 51 Hz, KP = 2, and KI = 20. All DGs’ CIV functions
have the uniform form [5]: λi (Pi ) = ai Pi + bi exp(ci Pi ) + di ,
the detailed data are given in Table I and the corresponding
curves are plotted in Fig. 3(b).
The initial total load is 2.5 MW and two scenarios are con-
t = 45 s, the load increases to 3.5 MW. Fig. 4(a) shows the
microgrid frequency and Fig. 4(b) shows DGs’ CIVs.
It follows from Fig. 4(a) that the frequency deviation has
a short transient process when load is increased, it can rapidly
converge to steady state and the maximum deviation is less
than 0.05 Hz. Fig. 4(b) illustrates that all DGs can reach
XIN et al.: DECENTRALIZED HIERARCHICAL CONTROL STRUCTURE AND SELF-OPTIMIZING CONTROL STRATEGY
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4. Dynamics of DGs under the proposed strategy. (a) Microgrid
frequency. (b) CIVs of DGs.
the EIP point. After 45 s, DG1–DG4 reach the EIP point.
However, the DG5’s CIV is less than the EIP value due to its
close to the maximum full-load operation [4].
Moreover, the simulation results illustrate that the pro-
posed strategy can be cooperative with the strategy in [4]
in an islanded microgrid, such that the DGs of both
F-P and P-F types can be self-optimizing without MGCC or
communication.
5
IV. C ONCLUSION
A decentralized and self-optimizing control strategy is pro-
posed for F-P type DGs, which can perform hierarchical
control function and realize optimal power allocation among
DGs without communication or MGCC. Moreover, the pro-
posed control strategy can be further extended to synchronous
generators, since common synchronous generator is of F-P
type though it is a VS.
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