A Hardware-in-Loop Simulation of DC Microgrid using Multi-Agent Systems

Smart-grid is a complex system that incorporates distributed control, communication, optimization, and management functions in addition to the legacy functions such as generation, storage, and control. The design and test of new smart-grid algorithms require an efficient simulator. Agentbased simulation platforms are the most popular tools that work well in the control and monitoring functionalities of the power electric network such as the microgrid. Most existing simulation tools necessitate either simulated or static data. In this paper, we propose a hardware-in-loop simulator for dc-microgrid. The simulator reads the power generated by the PV panels and the battery SoC using Raspberry PI. A physical agent that runs on Raspberry PI sends the real-time data to a dc-microgrid simulator that runs on a PC. As a proof of concept, we implemented a load-shedding algorithm using the proposed system.