Study of Clustering Technique and Communication Topologies for Cooperative Control-Based Volt-Var Optimization

Authors

• Gaurav Yadav, University of KentuckyFollow
• Yuan Liao, University of KentuckyFollow
• Dan M. Ionel, University of KentuckyFollow

Abstract

Introducing renewable distributed generation (DG) in the power distribution system causes rapid voltage fluctuations due to its intermittency. This intermittency renders conventional voltage regulation devices such as on-load tap changers (OLTCs) and capacitor banks (CBs) inefficient to regulate rapid voltage changes and leads to reduced equipment lifetime and high operation and maintenance costs. Hence, this calls for non-conventional methods to mitigate such voltage fluctuations. This paper presents a cooperative control-based method aimed to optimally control the reactive power of DG inverters to mitigate the voltage deviations by establishing communication among the DG nodes, and between DG and non-DG nodes. This paper focuses on two objectives: 1) To devise novel communication topologies to understand the impact of communication on reactive power control. 2) To develop a novel method to perform cooperative control for large power distribution systems by clustering the DGs to reduce the complexity and computational burden due to increase in size of the communication matrix. The proposed communication impact study and the novel cooperative control method have been verified on modified IEEE 123-bus systems.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Notes/Citation Information

© 2026 The Authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3683382

Repository Citation

Yadav, Gaurav; Liao, Yuan; and Ionel, Dan M., "Study of Clustering Technique and Communication Topologies for Cooperative Control-Based Volt-Var Optimization" (2026). Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications. 66.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/ece_facpub/66