In this paper, an energy coordination control method based on intelligent multi-agent systems (MAS) is proposed for energy management and voltage control of a DC microgrid. The structure of the DC microgrid is designed to realize the mathematical modeling of photovoltaic cells, fuel cells and batteries. A two-layer intelligent MAS is designed for energy coordination control: grid-connection and islanding of a DC microgrid is combined with energy management of PV cells, fuel cells, loads and batteries. In the hidden layer and the output layer of the proposed neural network there are 17 and 8 neurons, respectively, and the “logsig” activation function is used for the neurons in the network. Eight kinds of feature quantities and 13 different actions are taken as the input and output parameters of the neural network from the micro-source and the load, and the as the control center agent’s decision-makers. The feasibility of the proposed intelligent multi-agent energy coordination control strategy is verified by MATLAB/Simulink simulation, and three types of examples are analyzed after increasing the load. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits better performance than the traditional approaches.

Aiming at the problem of DC voltage control deviation and instability caused by a large-scale renewable energy access VSC–MTDC system, this paper combines voltage margin control and droop control. A strategy for controlling collaborative optimization in a sparsely distributed communication network has been proposed. Firstly, the distributed modeling of the system is carried out by combining MAS technology with small signal modeling. Then, a distributed model predictive controller is designed for a single droop control converter station. On this basis, a distributed cooperative optimization control strategy is proposed. According to the DC voltage deviation, the system adopts different control methods to control the receiving converter station. Finally, based on PSCAD/EMTDC and MATLAB co-simulation platforms, a six-terminal flexible HVDC system is built to verify the effectiveness of the control strategy under different conditions such as input power fluctuation, any converter station out of operation and system communication failure.

PIC microcontroller has a vital role in various types of controllers and nowadays the presence of PIC microcontroller is unavoidable in most control applications. This paper describes the enhancement of soft starting of induction motors using PIC microcontroller. Soft starting is required for the induction motors with reduced applied voltages so that the peak starting current is reduced and the startup of the motor is smooth with controlled torque and reduced mechanical vibrations, reduced starting current with correspondingly reduced bus voltage drops. While many of the available schemes of soft starting offer better results in view of smooth starting process, the proposed methodology offers soft starting as well as it cares about the source current quality. In contrast to the conventional multistep starting scheme, in this work a continuously controlled starting scheme is proposed. The three phase AC voltage controller topology is used as the core controller. In each of the half cycles, instead of a single conduction period with a single delay angle, the proposed AC voltage controller is switched symmetrically in each half cycle with multiple pulses in each quarter cycle. Symmetrically placed fixed numbers of switching pulses are used. The paper also describes the various time ratio controls namely the phase angle controller, the extinction angle controller and the symmetrical angle controller. The design aspects of the proposed soft starting scheme and the validation of the proposed system in the MATLAB SIMULINK environment are presented in this paper.