Online Voltage Regulation of Distribution Systems with Disturbance-Action Controllers

TL;DR

This paper presents a disturbance-action controller for online voltage regulation in distribution systems, enhancing robustness and adaptability to load fluctuations and communication delays using a novel formulation of load disturbances.

Contribution

It introduces a new disturbance-action control framework that formulates load-induced voltage drops as disturbances, with stability analysis and robustness improvements demonstrated through simulations.

Findings

Effective voltage regulation under fluctuating loads

Enhanced robustness to system dynamics and delays

Successful generalization across different load conditions

Abstract

Inverter-based distributed energy resources facilitate the advanced voltage control algorithms in the online setting with the flexibility in both active and reactive power injections. A key challenge is to continuously track the time-varying global optima with the robustness against dynamics inaccuracy and communication delay. In this paper, we introduce the disturbance-action controller by novelly formulating the voltage drop from loads as the system disturbance. The controller alternatively generates the control input and updates the parameters based on the interactions with grids. Under the linearized power flow model, we provide stability conditions of the control policy and the performance degradation to model inaccuracy. The simulation results on the radial distribution networks show the effectiveness of proposed controller under fluctuating loads and significant improvement on the robustness to these challenges. Furthermore, the ability of incorporating history information and generalization to various loads are demonstrated through extensive experiments on the parameter sensitivity.