Signal-Anticipation in Local Voltage Control in Distribution Systems

Abstract: We consider the signal-anticipating behavior in local Volt/Var control for distribution systems. Such a behavior makes interaction among the nodes a game. We characterize Nash equilibrium of the game as the optimum of a global optimization problem and establish its asymptotic global stability. We also show that the signal-anticipating voltage control has less restrictive convergence condition than the signal-taking control. We then introduce the notion of Price of Signal-Anticipation (PoSA) to characterize the impact of signal-anticipating control, and use the gap in cost between network equilibrium in the signal-taking control and Nash equilibrium in the signal-anticipating control as the metric for PoSA. We characterize how the PoSA scales with the size, topology, and heterogeneity of the distribution network for a few network settings. Our results show that the PoSA is upper bounded by a constant and the average PoSA per node will go to zero as the size of the network increases. This is desirable as it means that the PoSA will not be arbitrarily large, no matter what the size of the network is, and no mechanism is needed to mitigate the signal-anticipating behavior. We further carry out numerical experiments with a real-world distribution circuit to complement the theoretical analysis.