Fault tolerant predictive control design for reliable microgrid energy management under uncertainties

This paper presents an extension of a MPC (Model Predictive Control) approach for microgrid energy management which takes into account electricity costs, power consumption, generation profiles, power and energy constraints as well as uncertainty due to variations in the environment. The approach is based on a coherent framework of control tools, like mixed-integer programming and soft constrained MPC, for describing the microgrid components dynamics and the overall system control architecture. Fault tolerant strategies are inserted in order to ensure the proper amount of energy in the storage devices such that (together with the utility grid) the essential consumer demand is always covered. Simulation results on a particular microgrid architecture validate the proposed approach. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.