Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2022
Abstract
Electricity demands are increasing significantly and the traditional power grid system isfacing huge challenges. As the desired next-generation power grid system, smart grid can providesecure and reliable power generation, and consumption, and can also realize the system’s coordinatedand intelligent power distribution. Coordinating grid power distribution usually requiresmutual communication between power distributors to accomplish coordination. However, the powernetwork is complex, the network nodes are far apart, and the communication bandwidth is oftenexpensive. Therefore, how to reduce the communication bandwidth in the cooperative power distributionprocess task is crucially important. One way to tackle this problem is to build mechanismsto selectively send out communications, which allow distributors to send information at certain moments and key states. The distributors in the power grid are modeled as reinforcement learning agents, and the communication bandwidth in the power grid can be reduced by optimizing the communication frequency between agents. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a model for deciding whether to communicate based on the causal inference method, Causal Inference Communication Model (CICM). CICM regards whether to communicate as a binary intervention variable, and determines which intervention is more effective by estimating the individual treatment effect (ITE). It offers the optimal communication strategy about whether to send information while ensuring task completion. This method effectively reduces the communication frequency between grid distributors, and at the same time maximizes the power distribution effect. In addition, we test the method in StarCraft II and 3D environment habitation experiments, which fully proves the effectiveness of the method.
Keywords
smart grid, deep reinforcement learning, cooperative agents, communication, causal model, estimating ITE, variational auto-encoder
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering
Publication
Sensors
Volume
22
Issue
20
First Page
1
Last Page
24
ISSN
1424-8220
Identifier
10.3390/s22207785
Publisher
MDPI
Citation
ZHANG, Xianjie; LIU, Yu; LI, Wenjun; and GONG, Chen.
Pruning the communication bandwidth between reinforcement learning agents through causal inference: An innovative approach to designing a smart grid power system. (2022). Sensors. 22, (20), 1-24.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/11119
Copyright Owner and License
Authors-CC-BY
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.3390/s22207785
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons