A Gradient based Decentralized Volt/Var Optimization
Scheme for Distribution Systems with Smart Inverters
Yue Shi, Student Member, IEEE
Department of ECE
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, USA
Abstract—In this paper, a decentralized Volt/Var optimization
(VVO) scheme is proposed for distribution systems. It considers
the use of smart inverters for distributed generators (DGs) in a
distribution system together with voltage regulators (VRs) and
load tap changers (LTCs). The proposed decentralized VVO
scheme, which divides the system into sub-areas based on
sensitivity, is a master-slave approach based on the gradient
method. The effectiveness of this proposed VVO scheme is tested
on an IEEE 34 nodes system with high penetration of DGs.
Index Terms-- Decentralized Volt/Var optimization, gradient
method, smart distribution systems, distributed generation.
I. INTRODUCTION
Voltage regulation in a distribution system is a
fundamental requirement for all utilities. In conventional
distribution systems, voltage regulators, and load tap changers
(LTCs) and capacitor banks (CAPs) are the devices that have
been used for Volt/Var control (VVC) purpose. With the
increasing penetration of DGs, such as PV, smart inverters are
encouraged to be used as Var control devices [1]. With the
extension of SCADA to distribution system, the traditional
VVC can be improved to achieve more efficiency while
keeping the voltages acceptable. By exploiting these new
technologies, more advanced schemes, called Volt/Var
optimization – VVO schemes are under development.
Although the primary goal of VVO is to keep voltages
within acceptable range, the objective of VVO can be
formulated differently. Among the proposed approaches, [2]
uses power loss, and [3] uses control cost minimization as the
objective function. Other objectives include demand reduction
and power factor correction [4]. With different formulations of
VVO problem, the methods to solve them vary as well.
Proposed VVO methods can be divided into two categories: i)
centralized VVO [5] [6], and ii) decentralized VVO [7]-[10].
In this paper, a new decentralized VVO method is proposed to
minimize power loss while maintaining voltages acceptable
under different system operation conditions.
Recently, efforts have been made to develop decentralized
VVO. A decentralized VVO based on Dantzig-Wolfe
decomposition is proposed in [8], where the master problem
and sub-problems need to be updated iteratively. This
This work was done in 2016.
Mesut Baran, Fellow, IEEE
Department of ECE
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, USA
approach can reduce the dimension of the original VVO
problem significantly at the cost of more iterations. In [9] a
distributed VVO which does not require a master coordinator
is proposed. And the local controllers use the local sensitivity,
thus the solution is approximate.
The proposed VVO scheme divides the smart inverters
into groups based on sensitivity and then uses a gradient based
method to dispatch the reactive power injection by smart
inverters to achieve to the goal of power loss minimization. In
section II, the proposed VVO scheme is presented. Section III
provides the test results on a modified IEEE 34 nodes system
and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed VVO scheme by
comparing to an LP based centralized VVO scheme.
II. DECENTRALIZED VOLT/VAR OPTIMIZATION
The VVO scheme considered in this paper is for a
distribution system which has a large number of DGs with
smart inverters that can provide reactive power support for
VVC. This is motivated based on the recent revisions on IEEE
standard 1547 to facilitate such services by smart inverters
[11]. Since these inverters can control the amount of reactive
power injection, a large number of these inverters would
eliminate the use of CAPs in the system. Therefore, in this
paper, the smart inverters are the only Var control devices. To
solve the VVO problem, the paper makes use of the fact that
there’s weak coupling between the voltage correction by VR
(and/or LTC) and the reactive compensation by these inverters
or CAPs. Hence, the VVO problem is decoupled into Volt
problem and Var problem [2]. This paper will focus on how to
solve the Var problem using the proposed VVO method, i.e. to
determine the reactive power injection for the smart inverters
assuming that VRs and the LTC are set to keep the voltages
within limits.
A. Problem Formulation
In this paper, we adopted the formulation used in [8] for
VVO, which is given below:
min f ( x)  Ploss  x  (1)
s.t. g ( x, u )  0 (2)
V min
V V max
(3)
 Qmin  Qinj  Qmax
where x  [ ; V ] are voltage angles and magnitudes, and
u has the control variables, i.e. the reactive power injection
from DER inverters, Qinj . The equality constraints in (2)
correspond to power flow equations [12]:
 
 PGi  PLi  Vi V j  Gij cos ij  Bij sin ij 
g  x, u      0 (5)
j
 
 Qinji  Vi V j  Gij sin ij  Bij cos ij  
 j  β(k)=β_new(k)
where PG i is the real power generation from the DG at node i,
PL i is the real power consumption at node i, Qinj i is the
reactive power injection from the smart inverter at node i,
i j  i   j is the voltage angle difference between node i
and node j, Gi j  jBi j  Yi j is the element of Y-bus matrix.
B. Gradient based VVO scheme
The gradient based method is adopted to solve the VVO
problem. Since the minute to minute variation of the load on
a feeder is not considerable, gradient of the objective function
fu (t ) provides an effective direction for updating the
control [5]. Real-time implementation of VVO involves
updating the control every 5-10 minutes. Hence, in the
proposed method, the gradient fu (t ) is calculated first
(details of calculating fu is given at appendix) and then the
control is updated as
u(t )  u(t  1)  * (t ) fu (t )
at each control update period. In the update, the challenge is
to determine the best step size * such that the objective
function (power loss) is minimized without violating
constrains. This is achieved by a search as shown in Figure 1.
As the figure shows  is updated as
 (k  1)   (k )  
for some   1 . The largest  (k ) which achieves the
maximum power loss reduction without violating the voltage
constraints is selected as * (t ) . The initial value  (0) is
selected such that the minimum change for the control
(inverters) u
min
is some small value, for example 0.01
kVar.
C. Decentralized VVO – A master-slave scheme
Since a distribution feeder line section can be rather short,
the distance between the smart inverters will be short, and
therefore, sensitivity of the voltage to Qinj for the inverters
that are close to each other will be very similar. Indeed when
we examine the gradient fu (t ) we can see that that is the
case. This observation indicates that we can group the
(4) Start
Calculate the present gradient ∇f
k=0
Initialization of step-size: β(0)
Calculate power loss based on ∇f and β(k)
to get Ploss_old(k)
β_new(k)= γβ(k)
k=k+1
Calculate power loss based on ∇f and β_new(k)
to get Ploss_new(k)
Yes
Ploss_new(k)<Ploss_old(k)?
No
β* =β(k)
Figure 1. Flow chart of step-size searching
inverters that are close to each other together and put them
under a local “slave controller”, so that all the inverters in this
group can be controlled together. This is the approach used to
group the inverters on a feeder into smaller clusters and
develop a decentralized scheme based on this clustering. To
coordinate the control among these groups, a “master
controller” is used to act as a supervisory controller and to
provide the update signals to slave units based on the gradient
method. Figure 2 shows the implementation of the proposed
master-slave VVO scheme. As the figure indicates, At each
control period, slave controllers collects the real-time load and
PV generation information and VVC device output from all
nodes in the group and send the data to the master controller.
The master controller calculates the gradient f u and
determines the best step-size * and then sends the results to
the slave controllers. After receiving gradient, each slave uses
the gradient and the step-size * to determine the total Qinj
needed from inverters in the group, allocates it to individual
inverters equally, and sends the updated Qinj setting to the
inverters. If an inverter hits its Q limit, it will be set to operate
at that limit.
In this decentralized master-slave VVO scheme, the master
controller communicates only with the slave controllers,
therefore it decreases the communication requirement as
compared to the traditional centralized control scheme which
requires communication between control center and all VVC
devices.
 The original load data is given in [13]. Based on this data, the
following cases have been simulated.
Gradient Calculation A. Case1: peak load condition
& Convergence Check
This case considers the peak load condition. In this case,
System first, the LTC is set to 1.05 p.u. and VR#1 is set at tap 8 for all
Model Communication three phases in order to bring the voltages within limits. The
Interface initial control for the smart inverters is assumed to be u  0 ,
i.e. all inverters are at unity power factor. The initial step-
size,  (0) , is selected based on the assumption that
u  0.02 kVar and  is selected to be 1.1. Figure 4
min

Load , DG Output
Gradient & Step-size
& VVC Device Output shows the iterations for the optimal step-size search. As the
figure shows, the power loss decreases monotonically and the
search stops at the 16th iteration. An LP based centralized
VVO is also used to compare the performance. Table I shows
Distributed VVO that the proposed scheme is able to obtain a solution very
Controller close to the optimal solution obtained by the LP VVO. The
voltage profile before and after VVO is shown in Figure 5. As
Communication the figure shows, the VVO helps also raise the voltage profile
Interface in this case.

Control commands

VVC devices

Figure 2. Implementation of the proposed VVO scheme

III. TEST RESULTS

In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
VVO scheme, the IEEE 34 node test feeder [13] is modified
with PVs connected to all nodes with load. Since these Figure 4. Convergence characteristics of Case 1
inverters can provide sufficient reactive power to improve the
voltage profile, only one VR is needed in this modified
system, and hence VR#2 is removed.

Grouping of smart inverters:

Figure 3 shows how the inverters are grouped based on
sensitivity/gradient analysis. As the figure shows in this case
20 inverters are divided into 6 groups. Managing this small
number of groups becomes easier than the individual inverters
for VVO using a centralized approach.
In order to test the performance of the proposed scheme,
operating conditions during heavy loading is simulated.
Figure 5. Phase A voltage profile

TABLE I. RESULTS OF GRADIENT VVO V.S. LP VVO

Iterations Vmin Vmax Loss Loss
(p.u.) (p.u.) (kW) Reduction(kW)
Before
0.965 1.05 208.579
VVO
After
Gradient 16 0.972 1.05 206.938 1.642
VVO
Figure 3. Grouping of the smart inverters on the IEEE 34 nodes system After LP
21 0.973 1.05 206.856 1.724
VVO
 Runtime of the proposed VVO for Case 1 is 0.97s and
considerably less than the 3.38s runtime of the LP based
VVO. This is not only because the gradient based approach
has less iterations, but also because each iteration of LP VVO
takes more time to update and solve the LP problem.
B. Case2: Daily operation
To simulate operation of the test feeder on a typical day, a
24-hour PV and load profile with a 5 min resolution, shown in
Figure 6, is used. This simulation is used to test the
effectiveness of the proposed VVO in adjusting reactive
power injection of smart inverters as the net load changes.
In this case, the substation LTC and the voltage regulator
VR#1 on the feeder are used first to keep the voltages within
limits. Then the proposed VVO scheme is run to minimize the
power loss and provide additional voltage boost/buck if need.
Figure 7 shows the VR tap adjustments during the day. LTC is
set to 1.05 p.u. when the system load is larger than the PV
generation; otherwise LTC is set to 0.9875 p.u.. Figure 8
shows how the power loss is minimized as VVO adjusts the
reactive power injection of the smart inverters during the day.
Figure 9 shows the maximum reactive power injected by the
inverters max (Qinj i) at each control step. As the figure
confirms, with small load variation at each step, max (Qinj i)
variations are small, although the magnitude of Qinj support
can be considerable especially during the high load conditions.
Figure 10 shows that the proposed scheme keeps the node
voltages within the acceptable range of 0.95-1.05 p.u..
Figure 6. A 24-hour PV and load profile
Figure 7. VR tap adjustments
To test the effectiveness of proposed VVO, the LP based
VVO has also been applied for this case. Figure 11 shows the
difference calculated by subtracting power loss of the
proposed VVO from power loss of the LP VVO. Positive
values means the proposed VVO is performing better than the
LP VVO. As the figure shows, most of the time the difference
is very small which indicates the performance of the two VVO
schemes are very close. At some load conditions, the
difference is large which means that the proposed VVO
performs better than the LP VVO, this is because the LP
method can lose the accuracy due to linearization and setting
of the LP parameters. In this case, it happens that the LP
indicates a power loss reduction, however the actual power
loss increases.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a master-slave based decentralized VVO
scheme is proposed for a distribution system with high DG
penetration. The method provides supervisory reactive power
control to the smart inverters used with DGs in order to
provide effective coordination between these devices.
Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the
proposed VVO scheme in adjusting the Qinj for the smart
inverters as the load and DG generation change during a day.
The test results indicate the proposed method can reduce the
power loss as good as (some times better than) the LP based
approach. This gradient based scheme is computationally very
efficient and has less communication requirement compared
with conventional centralized control.
Figure 8. 24-hour power loss profile with proposed VVO
Figure 9. Maximum Reactive Power Injection by inverters
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APPENDIX:

f
Figure 10. Maximum and minnimum voltage profile with proposed
Calculation of Gradient fu 
VVO
u
By the chain rule, we have the following

f f g
 (6)
u g u
f f g
  (7)
x g x
f f
here and are row vectors. Equation (7) can be written
u x
as
Figure 11. Power loss comparison
1
f f  g 
  (8)
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