Sustainability-Oriented Priority-Based Load Management Control Architectures for Demand-Constrained Grid-Tied PV–Battery AC Microgrids Using MAS: A Comparative Evaluation

Sustainable energy management in grid-connected AC microgrids is investigated through a comparative assessment of centralized, distributed, and decentralized multi-agent-system-based load management control architectures integrating photovoltaic (PV) generation and battery energy storage system. A sustainability-oriented rule-based load scheduling strategy is implemented to efficiently utilize available renewable energy while maintaining grid power consumption within the prescribed demand limits and ensuring priority support for critical loads. Multi-agent-system (MAS)-based load agents coordinate centralized, distributed, and decentralized load management operations. The control architectures are evaluated under identical load profiles, PV generation patterns, and demand-limit constraints to ensure a fair comparison of sustainability-oriented energy management performance. Their resilience is further assessed under agent failures, communication losses, and delays. The comparative analysis employs sustainability-oriented performance metrics, including load served percentage, load curtailment percentage, demand-limit violation duration, and PV utilisation, to assess reliable energy delivery, demand-side efficiency, grid compliance, and effective renewable-energy utilisation. The results reveal distinct architectural trade-offs in sustainable energy management: decentralized control offers greater resilience to agent failures and achieves the highest average load-served percentage (64.83%) and lowest demand-limit violation duration (40.61 ms). Distributed control provides enhanced coordination and priority-based load management, with intermediate performance (64.10%, 41.17 ms), whereas centralized control is constrained by single-point failures and scalability, exhibiting the lowest performance (58.52%, 43.33 ms). PV utilisation remains approximately 99% across all architectures, indicating near-complete utilisation of available solar generation for load supply and battery charging with minimal curtailment.