Optimal Communication Network Design of Microgrids Considering Cyber-Attacks and Time-Delays

Distributed secondary control stands out for its flexibility and expandability in microgrids (MGs) control, in where communication network plays a fundamental and critical role. The communication topology and link-weights have significant impact on the attack-resilience and dynamic performance of MGs, which should be appropriately designed. However, the joint optimization problem of communication topology and link-weights in the existing literature of consensus-based secondary voltage control of MGs is usually neglected. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel two-stage optimization approach for the communication network design, which jointly optimizes the topological structure to enhance the structural survivability and link weights to improve the dynamic performance (including the speed of convergence and robustness to time-delay). The first stage problem is formulated into a mixed-integer semi-define programming (MISDP) model based on convex relaxation technique, which is then converted equivalently into an integer quadratic programming (IQP) problem and then a MISDP feasibility problem to facilitate the solution. The second stage problem is formulated into a bi-objective SDP model to compromise between the convergence performance and robustness to time-delay. Simulations based on a microgrid with 10 distributed generation (DG) units under different scenarios are implemented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.