Robustness of Reinforcement Learning-Based Congestion Management in Low-Voltage Grids

Josef Hoppe, Sarra Bouchkati, Farah Nasr, Jonathan Krapp, Alexander Och, Maximilian Wirth, Jan Schiefelbein-Lach, Oliver Pohl, Andreas Ulbig, Michael T. Schaub

Increases in photovoltaic generation, charging of electric vehicles and heat-pump demand challenge operating limits in low-voltage distribution grids. This requires curative curtailment methods that can operate under sparse observability, noisy measurements, and imperfect grid models. Unlike prior end-to-end reinforcement-learning approaches for partially observable curtailment, this work decouples congestion detection and control by combining a random-forest violation pre-classifier with an actor-critic controller, and evaluates its robustness to measurement noise and grid-parameter mismatch. The framework is tested on a real low-voltage grid using synthetic future operating scenarios with low observability and controllability. With accurate grid parameters, the controller reduces total violation magnitude by 98.9%, and this performance remains nearly unchanged under the tested measurement-noise settings. Grid-model mismatch proves to be more challenging, but the controller still mitigates most violations under the tested mismatch assumptions.