A Soft Coordination Method of Heterogeneous Devices in Distribution System Voltage Control

With the continuous increase of photovoltaic (PV) penetration, the voltage control interactions between newly installed PV inverters and previously deployed on-load tap-changer (OLTC) transformers become ever more significant. To achieve coordinated voltage regulation, current methods often rely on a decision-making algorithm to fully take over the control of all devices, requiring OLTC to give up its existing tap switching logic and execute corresponding upgrades. Aiming at bridging this gap, a soft coordination framework is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the decision-making commands are only applied on inverters, and OLTC that retains its own operation rule will be indirectly controlled by the changed system voltage, which is a result of appropriately adjusting inverters' Var output. The proposed method achieves the soft coordination by establishing a modified actor-critic algorithm to train a proxy model of inverters. The well-trained proxy model can properly adjust inverters' Var output to "softly" coordinate OLTC's tap operations, which finally attains coordinated voltage regulation and line loss minimization. Simulation results verify the superiority of our proposed method over traditional ones in coordinating heterogeneous devices for voltage control.