Secondary Frequency Control Through Serverless Cloud Computing for Active Distribution Networks

作者：Jitendra Thapa, Maxim Rusakov, Mohammed Benidris · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1109/tsg.2025.3630594 · 研究领域：Computer Science

With the growing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), many regulating entities, such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in the USA, have initiated a notice of inquiry for the utilization of cloud services for power system operation, including ancillary grid services from DERs. Motivated by these initiatives, this paper develops a serverless cloud computing architecture for real-time secondary frequency control in active distribution networks (ADNs). A secondary frequency control architecture is developed along with an optimization-based controller for optimally dispatching the regulating units in response to automatic generation control (AGC) signals. The developed optimization is fully integrated with the proposed serverless cloud computing architecture, utilizing several Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Lambda, IoT Core, and S3. The AWS cloud architecture communicates with a real-time digital simulator, which mimics an ADN, utilizing IoT devices like Raspberry Pi and several utility standard communication protocols such as MQTT and TCP/IP. To demonstrate the dispatch of regulating units using the proposed serverless cloud computing architecture—and to validate the performance of the developed optimization-based controller—a real-time model of an actual feeder from NV Energy (the largest utility in Nevada) is utilized. Furthermore, a grid response time analysis is conducted to enable proper sequencing of frequency regulation commands by predic...