Improved Architecture of PEBB Plug and Play Power Electronics Systems: Elementary Control Object (ECO) and Dataflow Jinghong Guo, Stephen Edwards, and Dushan Borojevic Center for Power Electronics Systems The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA Abstract—This paper presents a reconfigurable and reusable decentralized architecture, ECO—Dataflow architecture, for control of power electronics systems. Under this architecture, the control of a power electronics system is composed of elementary control objects (ECOs), and the connections between ECOs is implemented by Dataflow. Software implementations of ECOs and Dataflow will be discussed. A 3-phase inverter will be constructed under ECO—Dataflow architecture, and the system under the proposed architecture will be compared to the system designed in the legacy architecture. I. INTRODUCTION The traditional central approach of developing power electronics control systems has been significantly challenged to face rapidly changing requirements and environments [1]. As digital control introduced into power electronics systems, some researches have been done in modularization and standardization of power electronics systems. Power electronics building blocks (PEBB) is one of the early efforts to modularize power stage hardware [2]. Shortly after some converter systems were built on PEBBs successfully, how to modularize and standardize control of large-scale power electronics systems came into concern. General speaking, the control of a power electronics system has two main tasks. One is to conduct the converter control algorithm, which is application specific. The other is to interface with system hardware. Application manager (AM) and hardware manager (HM) concept reflects some initial considerations to develop decentralized power electronics systems [3]. At the same time, power electronics systems oriented high-speed communication network was investigated, such as PESNet, which can support distributed control in power electronics systems [4]. The goal of these researches is to provide a building block based plug and play capability for developing highly decentralized power electronics systems, built from standardized, co-operative and intelligent modules. One big issue comes out is how to develop the system architecture to reach this goal. This paper presents a component-based system architecture, ECO—Dataflow architecture, to compose This work was supported primarily by the ERC Program of the National Science Foundation under Award Number EEC-9731677. modularized, standardized, reusable and automatic configurable power electronics systems. Section II of this paper shows how to divide the power electronics system control into elementary control objects (ECO) and how to connect ECOs by Dataflow to a complete control. The Software implementation of ECOs and Dataflow will be discussed in section III. In section IV, a 3-phase PEBB based inverter will be used as an example to show how a power electronics system is constructed under ECO—Dataflow architecture. And the ECO—Dataflow architecture will be compared with legacy approach of power electronics system design. II. ECO—DATAFLOW ARCHITECTURE By investigating control of different types of power electronics systems, it should be noticed that control of a power electronics system could be seen as composed of many basic functional blocks, such as regulator, modulator, etc. Thus we propose elementary control object (ECO) approach to modularize the control of power electronics systems. Dataflow, a type of software architecture, is introduced to organize ECOs into a run time controller. A. Elementary Control Object (ECO) The division of the power electronics system control into elementary objects is functional based. An ECO is defined as: • Functional self-contained; • Having standard interface; • Independent; • Concurrently executing; • Implemented by multiple methods. These objects should be commonly used and abstract. By analyzing control of different power electronics system applications, elementary control functions can be identified. Fig. 1 shows some candidate ECOs in power electronics control.