Decentralized Gain Learning for Voltage Control via Local Trajectory Convolution

Fast and spatially heterogeneous fluctuations from distributed energy resources call for voltage regulation that is both fast and responsive to changing operating conditions. Local linear Volt/VAR control offers the advantage of promptly regulating voltages without real-time communication, but its performance depends critically on the choice of control gains. Optimizing these gains for a system-level objective, however, typically requires an accurate network model or centralized communication. In this work, we uncover a structural property that enables such optimization using only local measurements. Specifically, by exploiting the self-adjoint structure of the closed-loop voltage dynamics, we show that each component of the system-level objective gradient can be exactly recovered from a self-convolution of the corresponding bus’s voltage deviation trajectory. Building on this result, we develop a simple decentralized gain optimization method in which each bus updates its control gain using only its local data trajectory. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively updates the Volt/VAR control gains in response to changing operating conditions while requiring only local information.