The increasing penetration of renewable and distributed energy resources in distribution networks calls for real-time and distributed voltage control. In this paper we investigate local Volt/VAR control with a general class of control functions, and show that the power system dynamics with non-incremental local voltage control can be seen as a distributed algorithm for solving a well-defined optimization problem (reverse engineering). The reverse engineering further reveals a fundamental limitation of the non-incremental voltage control: the convergence condition is restrictive and prevents better voltage regulation at equilibrium. This motivates us to design two incremental local voltage control schemes based on the subgradient and pseudo-gradient algorithms respectively for solving the same optimization problem (forward engineering). The new control schemes decouple the dynamical property from the equilibrium property, and have much less restrictive convergence conditions. This work presents another step towards developing a new foundation - network dynamics as optimization algorithms - for distributed real-time control and optimization of future power networks.

中文翻译：

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配电网局部电压控制的逆向和正向工程

可再生能源和分布式能源在配电网络中的日益普及要求实时和分布式电压控制。在本文中，我们研究了具有一类一般控制函数的局部 Volt/VAR 控制，并表明具有非增量局部电压控制的电力系统动力学可以被视为一种分布式算法，用于解决定义明确的优化问题（逆向工程）。逆向工程进一步揭示了非增量电压控制的一个基本限制：收敛条件是限制性的，阻止了更好的平衡电压调节。这促使我们分别基于次梯度和伪梯度算法设计两种增量局部电压控制方案来解决相同的优化问题（正向工程）。新的控制方案将动态特性与平衡特性解耦，并且收敛条件的限制要少得多。这项工作为开发新的基础——网络动力学作为优化算法——迈出了又一步，用于未来电力网络的分布式实时控制和优化。