Voltage Regulation of DC-DC Buck Converters Feeding CPLs via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Modeling accuracy of DC-DC converters may deviate largely in the presence of different variation levels of constant power loads (CPLs), hence is well acknowledged as a main hurdle for the design of advanced model-driven control strategies in the literature. Aiming to enhance the bus voltage regulation performance of DC-DC buck converters, a model-free deep reinforcement learning (DRL) control strategy is proposed in this brief. Firstly, a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model and a deep Q network (DQN) algorithm are utilized for the stabilization issue of the converter. Secondly, through a subgoal reward/penalty mechanism, the control objective and prescribed performance of the system are therefore guaranteed. Moreover, a specified action space is designed to match the switch speed of the switching element. As a distinguishable feature, the settling time under the proposed control scheme is significantly reduced in the occurrence of disturbance, resulting from the fast adaption ability of DRL. The simulation comparison results in reference to PI and fuzzy PI controllers demonstrate the efficacy and superiorities under large signal perturbation conditions.