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Main Authors: Srinivasa, Tanay Raghunandan, Deulkar, Vivek, Bhargava, Jia, Hajiesmaili, Mohammad, Shenoy, Prashant
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22865
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author Srinivasa, Tanay Raghunandan
Deulkar, Vivek
Bhargava, Jia
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
author_facet Srinivasa, Tanay Raghunandan
Deulkar, Vivek
Bhargava, Jia
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
contents Battery energy storage systems are increasingly deployed as fast-responding resources for grid balancing services such as frequency regulation and for mitigating renewable generation uncertainty. However, repeated charging and discharging induces cycling degradation and reduces battery lifetime. This paper studies the real-time scheduling of a heterogeneous battery fleet that collectively tracks a stochastic balancing signal subject to per-battery ramp-rate and capacity constraints, while minimizing long-term cycling degradation. Cycling degradation is fundamentally path-dependent: it is determined by charge-discharge cycles formed by the state-of-charge (SoC) trajectory and is commonly quantified via rainflow cycle counting. This non-Markovian structure makes it difficult to express degradation as an additive per-time-step cost, complicating classical dynamic programming approaches. We address this challenge by formulating the fleet scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with constrained action space and designing a dense proxy reward that provides informative feedback at each time step while remaining aligned with long-term cycle-depth reduction. To scale learning to large state-action spaces induced by fine-grained SoC discretization and asymmetric per-battery constraints, we develop a function-approximation reinforcement learning method using an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) as a random nonlinear feature map combined with linear temporal-difference learning. We evaluate the proposed approach on a toy Markovian signal model and on a Markovian model trained from real-world regulation signal traces obtained from the University of Delaware, and demonstrate consistent reductions in cycle-depth occurrence and degradation metrics compared to baseline scheduling policies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Degradation-Aware Frequency Regulation of a Heterogeneous Battery Fleet via Reinforcement Learning
Srinivasa, Tanay Raghunandan
Deulkar, Vivek
Bhargava, Jia
Hajiesmaili, Mohammad
Shenoy, Prashant
Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
Battery energy storage systems are increasingly deployed as fast-responding resources for grid balancing services such as frequency regulation and for mitigating renewable generation uncertainty. However, repeated charging and discharging induces cycling degradation and reduces battery lifetime. This paper studies the real-time scheduling of a heterogeneous battery fleet that collectively tracks a stochastic balancing signal subject to per-battery ramp-rate and capacity constraints, while minimizing long-term cycling degradation. Cycling degradation is fundamentally path-dependent: it is determined by charge-discharge cycles formed by the state-of-charge (SoC) trajectory and is commonly quantified via rainflow cycle counting. This non-Markovian structure makes it difficult to express degradation as an additive per-time-step cost, complicating classical dynamic programming approaches. We address this challenge by formulating the fleet scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) with constrained action space and designing a dense proxy reward that provides informative feedback at each time step while remaining aligned with long-term cycle-depth reduction. To scale learning to large state-action spaces induced by fine-grained SoC discretization and asymmetric per-battery constraints, we develop a function-approximation reinforcement learning method using an Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) as a random nonlinear feature map combined with linear temporal-difference learning. We evaluate the proposed approach on a toy Markovian signal model and on a Markovian model trained from real-world regulation signal traces obtained from the University of Delaware, and demonstrate consistent reductions in cycle-depth occurrence and degradation metrics compared to baseline scheduling policies.
title Degradation-Aware Frequency Regulation of a Heterogeneous Battery Fleet via Reinforcement Learning
topic Systems and Control
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22865