Transfer Learning Enhanced Deep Reinforcement Learning for Volt-Var Control in Smart Grids

Citation

K. Kumar and G. Ravikumar, “Transfer Learning Enhanced Deep Reinforcement Learning for Volt-Var Control in Smart Grids,” 2025 IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Exposition (Grid Edge), San Diego, CA, USA, 2025, pp. 1-5, doi: 10.1109/GridEdge61154.2025.10887439. IEEE

Abstract

The integration of renewable energy resources has made power system management increasingly complex. DRL is a potential solution to optimize power system operations, but it requires significant time and resources during training. The control policies developed using DRL are specific to a single grid and require retraining from scratch for other grids. Training the DRL model from scratch is computationally expensive. This paper proposes a novel TL with a DRL framework to optimize VV C across different grids. This framework significantly reduces training time and improves VVC control performance by fine-tuning pre-trained DRL models for various grids. We developed a policy reuse classifier that transfers the knowledge from the IEEE-123 Bus system to the IEEE-13 Bus system. We performed an impact analysis to determine the effectiveness of TL. Our results show that TL improves the VVC control policy by 69.51 %, achieves faster convergence, and reduces the training time by 98.14%.