Shipboard Power System (SPS) is known as an independent controlled small electric network powered by the distributed onboard generation system. Since many electric components are tightly coupled in a small space and the system is not supported with a relatively stronger grid, SPS is more susceptible to unexpected disturbances and physical damages compared to conventional terrestrial power systems. Among different distribution configurations, power-electronic based DC distribution is considered the trending technology for the next-generation U.S. Navy fleet design to replace the conventional AC-based distribution. This research presents appropriate control management frameworks to improve the Medium-Voltage DC (MVDC) shipboard power system performance. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an advanced model-based approach which uses the system model to predict the future output states and generates an optimal control sequence over the prediction horizon. In this research, at first, a centralized MPC is developed for a nonlinear MVDC SPS when a high-power pulsed load exists in the system. The closed-loop stability analysis is considered in the MPC optimization problem. A comparison is presented for different cases of load prediction for MPC, namely, no prediction, perfect prediction, and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) prediction. Another centralized MPC controller is also designed to address the reconfiguration problem of the MVDC system in abnormal conditions. The reconfiguration goal is to maximize the power delivered to the loads with respect to power balance, generation limits and load priorities. Moreover, a distributed control structure is proposed for a nonlinear MVDC SPS to develop a scalable power management architecture. In this framework, each subsystem is controlled by a local MPC using its state variables, parameters and interaction variables from other subsystems communicated through a coordinator. The Goal Coordination principle is used to manage interactions between subsystems. The developed distributed control structure brings out several significant advantages including less computational overhead, higher flexibility and a good error tolerance behavior as well as a good overall system performance. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach, a performance analysis is accomplished by comparing centralized and distributed control of global and partitioned MVDC models for two cases of continuous and discretized control inputs
