Reactive Power Optimization of a Distribution Network Based on Graph Security Reinforcement Learning

With the increasing integration of renewable energy, the secure operation of distribution networks faces significant challenges, such as voltage limit violations and increased power losses. To address the issue of reactive power and voltage security under renewable generation uncertainty, this paper...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xu Zhang, Xiaolin Gui, Pei Sun, Xing Li, Yuan Zhang, Xiaoyu Wang, Chaoliang Dang, Xinghua Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2025-07-01
Series:Applied Sciences
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/15/15/8209
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:With the increasing integration of renewable energy, the secure operation of distribution networks faces significant challenges, such as voltage limit violations and increased power losses. To address the issue of reactive power and voltage security under renewable generation uncertainty, this paper proposes a graph-based security reinforcement learning method. First, a graph-enhanced neural network is designed, to extract both topological and node-level features from the distribution network. Then, a primal-dual approach is introduced to incorporate voltage security constraints into the agent’s critic network, by constructing a cost critic to guide safe policy learning. Finally, a dual-critic framework is adopted to train the actor network and derive an optimal policy. Experiments conducted on real load profiles demonstrated that the proposed method reduced the voltage violation rate to 0%, compared to 4.92% with the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm and 5.14% with the Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3) algorithm. Moreover, the average node voltage deviation was effectively controlled within 0.0073 per unit.
ISSN:2076-3417