Offline Reinforcement Learning on a Real-World Power Grid Control Problem

📋 Type Project
Status finished
📅 Duration Mar 10, 2026 – Jun 10, 2026
👤 Primary supervisor Julian Oelhaf
👥 Co-supervisors Siming Bayer Andreas Maier
🎓 Student Alexander Luce

Reinforcement Learning for Control and Protection in Power Distribution Systems

This project studies reinforcement learning (RL) methods for control and coordination tasks in power distribution systems, with a focus on reproducible, paper-driven implementation. A representative RL approach from the literature is re-implemented, including the design of state/action representations, reward formulation, and constraint handling.

The implementation is systematically validated on a controlled benchmark to ensure correctness, reproducibility, and consistent evaluation. Subsequently, the approach is assessed on simulation data from a realistic medium-voltage grid model to analyze performance under practical conditions.

Depending on progress, extensions towards more advanced RL formulations and protection-related applications are considered. The work emphasizes structured evaluation and reproducibility in safety-critical learning-based control.