Power Grid Control with Graph-Based Distributed Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fabrizio, Carlo, Losapio, Gianvito, Mussi, Marco, Metelli, Alberto Maria, Restelli, Marcello
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909768111620096
author Fabrizio, Carlo
Losapio, Gianvito
Mussi, Marco
Metelli, Alberto Maria
Restelli, Marcello
author_facet Fabrizio, Carlo
Losapio, Gianvito
Mussi, Marco
Metelli, Alberto Maria
Restelli, Marcello
contents The necessary integration of renewable energy sources, combined with the expanding scale of power networks, presents significant challenges in controlling modern power grids. Traditional control systems, which are human and optimization-based, struggle to adapt and to scale in such an evolving context, motivating the exploration of more dynamic and distributed control strategies. This work advances a graph-based distributed reinforcement learning framework for real-time, scalable grid management. The proposed architecture consists of a network of distributed low-level agents acting on individual power lines and coordinated by a high-level manager agent. A Graph Neural Network (GNN) is employed to encode the network's topological information within the single low-level agent's observation. To accelerate convergence and enhance learning stability, the framework integrates imitation learning and potential-based reward shaping. In contrast to conventional decentralized approaches that decompose only the action space while relying on global observations, this method also decomposes the observation space. Each low-level agent acts based on a structured and informative local view of the environment constructed through the GNN. Experiments on the Grid2Op simulation environment show the effectiveness of the approach, which consistently outperforms the standard baseline commonly adopted in the field. Additionally, the proposed model proves to be much more computationally efficient than the simulation-based Expert method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02861
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Power Grid Control with Graph-Based Distributed Reinforcement Learning
Fabrizio, Carlo
Losapio, Gianvito
Mussi, Marco
Metelli, Alberto Maria
Restelli, Marcello
Machine Learning
The necessary integration of renewable energy sources, combined with the expanding scale of power networks, presents significant challenges in controlling modern power grids. Traditional control systems, which are human and optimization-based, struggle to adapt and to scale in such an evolving context, motivating the exploration of more dynamic and distributed control strategies. This work advances a graph-based distributed reinforcement learning framework for real-time, scalable grid management. The proposed architecture consists of a network of distributed low-level agents acting on individual power lines and coordinated by a high-level manager agent. A Graph Neural Network (GNN) is employed to encode the network's topological information within the single low-level agent's observation. To accelerate convergence and enhance learning stability, the framework integrates imitation learning and potential-based reward shaping. In contrast to conventional decentralized approaches that decompose only the action space while relying on global observations, this method also decomposes the observation space. Each low-level agent acts based on a structured and informative local view of the environment constructed through the GNN. Experiments on the Grid2Op simulation environment show the effectiveness of the approach, which consistently outperforms the standard baseline commonly adopted in the field. Additionally, the proposed model proves to be much more computationally efficient than the simulation-based Expert method.
title Power Grid Control with Graph-Based Distributed Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02861