Fixed-Time Privacy-Preserving Distributed Coordinated Control for Grid-Forming and Grid-Following Inverters in Microgrids

As renewable energy integration continues to grow and microgrid (MG) systems become increasingly complex, it becomes critical to ensure system stability, security, and coordinated control among heterogeneous inverter types. This paper investigates the coordination among grid-forming inverters (GFMIs), grid-following inverters (GFLIs) under PQ control, and GFLIs under droop control. To address this problem, a communication layer based on the leader-follower consensus (LFC) architecture is established to enable information exchange among GFMIs, PQ-controlled GFLIs, and droop-controlled GFLIs. Building on this framework, a novel fixed-time privacy-preserving distributed coordinated controller is proposed by introducing a state decomposition mechanism. The proposed controller achieves fixed-time regulation of GFMI frequency and MG main bus voltage, ensures proportional active and reactive power sharing among all inverter types, and maintains the confidentiality of MG operational data. In comparison with existing studies, this work integrates the coordination of different inverter types, ensuring both operational efficiency and privacy protection, which has not been fully addressed in previous literature. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through real-time hardware-in-the-loop experiments.