Distributed power management with adaptive scheduling horizons for more electric aircraft

A more electric aircraft is expected to have low emissions, decreased fuel consumption, high efficiency, and low maintenance costs. To fully enjoy those benefits, major technical obstacles must be overcome first. In terms of power management, an increasing number of power electronic components used in aircraft power systems and their ever-increasing functional sophistication will lead to high modeling and computational complexities, making real-time power management a daunting challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper we will first propose a novel architecture for real-time power scheduling, which allows a user to easily incorporate fault diagnosis, stability analysis and power scheduling together, and then present a locally tactical power scheduling strategy based on a Lagrangian relaxation, which allows a user to adopt different computation techniques to undertake local computations within sub-systems in parallel to ensure good scalability of the distributed strategy. Moreover, the power scheduling is calculated based on an adaptive scheduling horizon to further reduce the computational complexity. Simulations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed distributed architecture, in particular, the optimality of the solution and the balanced computational complexity.