The increasing integration of renewable energy, electric vehicles, and industrial applications demands efficient power converter control strategies that reduce switching losses while maintaining high waveform quality. This paper presents a Finite-Control-Set Model Predictive Control (FCS-MPC) strategy for three-phase, two-level voltage source inverters (VSIs), incorporating a secondary objective for switching frequency minimization. Unlike conventional MPC approaches, the proposed method optimally balances control performance and efficiency trade-offs by adjusting the weighting factor (${\lambda }_{min}$). Real-time implementation using the OPAL-RT platform validates the effectiveness of the approach under both linear and non-linear load conditions. Results demonstrate a significant reduction in switching losses, accompanied by improved waveform tracking; however, trade-offs in distortion are observed under non-linear load scenarios. These findings provide insights into the practical implementation of real-time predictive control strategies for high-performance power converters.

The Modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a prominent topology for medium to high-voltage, high-power conversion applications. This converter has a modular construction based on building blocks named sub-modules (SMs). However, the large number of SMs required in a typical application makes operating the MMC through a centralized control architecture difficult. Recently, distributed control schemes have been proposed to provide a modular hardware and software development solution for the MMC. This control architecture allows a two-level hierarchy, in which there are distributed low-level control tasks among local controllers (LCs) placed in the converter SMs, while central controller (CC) undertakes high-level control tasks. Under this scheme, both LCs and the CC could execute their control algorithms at different time steps, optimizing the control hardware utilization: This has not been previously reported for MMC operating with a distributed control approach. Based on that, this article proposes an event-triggered distributed control scheme for regulating the capacitor voltages in the MMC. Contrary to previously reported works, the proposal only updates the control actions of LCs when a trigger event occurs, notably reducing the LCs hardware utilization. Real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulation studies validate the proposal's effectiveness, and its performance is compared with traditional consensus-based distributed approach, showing superior performance.