Physics-Informed Graph-Based Safe RL with Constraint-Specific Critics for Community Battery Coordination in Distribution Network

Overview & Synopsis

High penetrations of distributed energy resources (DERs) and fast-varying electric vehicle (EV) charging intensify voltage and line-limit violations in distribution networks (DNs), making safe, low-cost operation increasingly challenging. This paper proposes a physics-informed safe deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for coordinating community battery energy storage systems to mitigate constraint violations while minimizing operating cost. To represent nonlocal spatiotemporal interactions, we develop a dual-level physics-informed graph representation in which line impedance and capacity shape spatial information propagation, while power-balance, voltage-profile, and flow-reconstruction losses regularize the latent state toward control-relevant physical consistency. Building on this representation, we develop Lagrangian Dedicated-Critic PPO (LDCPPO), which implements constraint-specific value decomposition: independent reward and cost critics preserve heterogeneous voltage- and line-loading-related learning signals and combine their advantages only during the Lagrangian policy update. Case studies on DNs with high rooftop photovoltaic penetration and EV charging demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the key voltage-violation degree by up to 80.5% compared with the tested baselines, while also achieving the lowest voltage-violation count and line-overload degree with competitive operating cost.