This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the microgrid (MG) concept, including its definitions, challenges, advantages, components, structures, communication systems, and control methods, focusing on low-bandwidth (LB), wireless (WL), and wired control approaches. Generally, an MG is a small-scale power grid comprising local/common loads, energy storage devices, and distributed energy resources (DERs), operating in both islanded and grid-tied modes. MGs are instrumental to current and future electricity network development, such as a smart grid, as they can offer numerous benefits, such as enhanced network stability and reliability, increased efficiency, an increased integration of clean and renewable energies into the system, enhanced power quality, and so forth, to the increasingly growing and complicated power systems. By considering several objectives in both islanded and grid-tied modes, the development of efficient control systems for different kinds of MGs has been investigated in recent years. Among these control methods, LB communication (LBcom)-based control methods have attracted much attention due to their low expenses, recent developments, and high stability. This paper aims to shed some light on different aspects, a literature review, and research gaps of MGs, especially in the field of their control layers, concentrating on LBcom-based control methods.

Here, a new family of non‐isolated step‐up/down and step‐up switched‐capacitor (SC)‐based DC–DC converters are proposed possessing many advantages as lower voltage stress on capacitors and higher voltage gain compared to previously introduced DC–DC converters. The proposed converter structures have multiple capacitors which are based on principles of DC–DC SC converters. Therefore, the amount of power transfer from the input to the output is higher in the proposed converters. Generally, the proposed converters are more suitable for industrial applications, especially for generating high‐voltage gains in lower duty‐cycles. For proving the analysis, comprehensive comparisons and precise experiments have been performed which show remarkable performance of the proposed converter topologies.

To overcome the challenges of conventional power systems, such as increasing power demand, requirements of stability and reliability, and increasing integration of renewable energy sources, the concept of microgrids was introduced and is currently one of the most important solutions for solving the mentioned problems. Generally, microgrids have two operating modes, namely grid-connected and islanded modes. Based on the literature and its unique characteristics, the islanded mode is more challenging than the other one. In this paper, a new self-adaptive comprehensive differential evolution (SACDE) algorithm is proposed for solving economic load dispatch (ELD) and combined economic emission dispatch (CEED) problems, achieving optimal power consumption in isolated microgrids. Initially, SACDE is employed for solving the ELD problem as a single-objective function, meaning that the operational cost is just considered as the objective function, and thereby, the resources are scheduled accordingly. Then, a multi-objective platform based on SACDE is also proposed to solve the CEED problem. It means two objective functions, including operational cost and emission, are simultaneously optimized. For evaluating the performance of the proposed method, three different scenarios under various cases are considered. According to the results, when SACDE is employed to solve the single objective function (cost minimization) problem, it has better performance than other methods. In terms of the bi-objective scheme (cost and emission minimization), SACDE is significantly superior to the price penalty factor technique which is frequently used in previous studies.