Software-in-the-loop testing of a distributed optimal scheduling strategy for microgrids’ aggregators

Recent regulations have explicitly endorsed the provision of ancillary services by Microgrids (MGs). However, the associated technical requirements (e.g. minimum power reserve) still represent an impeding factor for most MGs given their reduced capability. For this reason, approaches to pool MGs into Aggregators, allowing to jointly coordinate MGs to fulfill such requirements, have been proposed but their practical feasibility has been not proved. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to test a previously proposed distributed day-ahead scheduling algorithm on a realistic benchmark with ABB e-mesh™ EMS, an industrial-grade MG energy management system. The results show that the approach can deal systematically with different MG units and controllers, maintaining its scalable and optimal performances.