Data-Driven Load Frequency Control Based on Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning With Attention Mechanism

With the massive penetration of renewable energy, traditional reinforcement learning algorithms suffer from slow convergence and area control error (ACE) in interconnected power systems. This paper proposes data-driven load frequency control (LFC) based on multi-agent reinforcement learning with attention mechanism in interconnected power systems. It can be divided into two phases; in the centralized training, the agents are trained by an experience replay mechanism; in the decentralized execution, the trained agent automatically regulates the generation power to control the load frequency by real-time access to the grid data in the area. The agent can selectively focus on specific information in the environment by introducing a criticism network with an attention mechanism. The attention mechanism can reduce the training time for reinforcement learning while improving control performance under disturbance. A novel reward function based on a cooperation mechanism is used to score the performance of agent, which can guide the reinforcement learning algorithm to reduce the ACE of each area simultaneously. The proposed method is validated by the IEEE three-area interconnected power system, and it is concluded that the method can reduce the ACE caused by load and renewable power disturbances, and greatly reduce the training time of the algorithm.