Development of a simulated tangle-based microgrid communications system

The emergence of renewable energy sources (RES) brought up the potential advantages of more granular controls that Microgrids offer. In this study, Tangle-based-decentralized ledger technology was implemented to the communications system of a fabricated prototype microgrid. The microgrid controls were managed by a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ minicomputer, where the energy manager, protection coordinator, and microsource controller agents are running. Through the Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) module of the IOTA Tangle ledger, the grid operator was able to act as an energy manager to send commands and receive status reports from the protection coordinator and microsource controller. The fabricated system was able to: connect/disconnect the microgrid from the distribution grid, enable/disable the microsources connected to the microgrid, and generate a status report of the microgrid. By logging each step of the microgrid function when executed, the correlation of each process of the communication to the total elapsed time was evaluated. Statistical analysis was performed through obtaining the Pearson correlation and its corresponding p-value with a 5% level of significance. It was shown that the MAM publishing process and network latency both have a strong and significant positive correlation to the total time elapsed for all three microgrid functions that were tested