Due to the dominance of renewable energy sources and DC loads, modern power distribution systems are undergoing a transformative shift toward DC microgrids. Therefore, this article is structured to present information on the design, optimization, control, and management of DC microgrids, demonstrating that DC systems have superseded AC systems across power production, transmission, and distribution. The core cause of this superiority is the DC microgrid’s scalability, flexibility, and ease of control. This review is focused on the structural analysis, intelligent and management schemes, market employability, and reliability analysis of a DC microgrid. After this work, some methods are presented that ensure the engineered DC microgrid remains robust to various environmental and operational conditions throughout its service life. The article is enriched with methodological flowcharts and block diagrams, from which design insights can be gained to design a reliable, resilient, robust DC microgrid. The article ends with an indication of how the future energy landscape will look, with the realization of modern technologies through DC microgrids.

The dynamics of power converters are highly influenced by uncertainties, nonlinearities, and external disturbances. Thus, high-performance, extremely resilient, and robust control strategies are necessary for their control. For the robust operation of power converters, this article presents an adaptive and finite-time convergent active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) framework inspired by Professor Han’s seminal paper. Based on ADRC’s philosophy, this article proposes a control scheme that integrates adaptiveness and finite-time convergence in both the extended state observer and the control law. The proposed framework ensures quick disturbance estimation and its rejection, thus ensuring that the required response is tracked successfully. The controllers for different power converters, such as buck converters, boost converters, and single-phase inverters, are designed to ensure the desired dynamics, including low settling times and zero-percent overshoots. The controllers are implemented in the discrete-time domain using forward differences. Simscape simulation experiments on buck converters, boost converters, and single-phase inverters demonstrate that the responses are achieved with finite settling time with no overshoots. Thus, such control strategies are highly crucial for mission-critical power applications.