GradMAP: Gradient-Based Multi-Agent Proximal Learning for Grid-Edge Flexibility

Coordinating large populations of grid-edge devices requires learning methods that remain fully decentralised in deployment while still respecting three-phase AC distribution-network physics. This paper proposes gradient-based multi-agent proximal learning (GradMAP) to address this challenge. GradMAP trains independent neural-network policies for each agent without any parameter sharing, and each agent uses only its own local observation for online decision-making without communication. During offline training, GradMAP embeds a differentiable three-phase AC power-flow model in a primal-dual learning loop and uses implicit differentiation to propagate exact network-constraint violations to update the policy parameters. To speed up training, GradMAP reuses expensive environment gradients through a proximal surrogate within a trust region defined in the more direct policy-output (action) space, instead of the probability distribution space used in other works, such as PPO. In case studies with 1,000 agents managing batteries, heat pumps, and controllable generators on the IEEE 123-bus feeder, GradMAP learns decentralised policies that minimise three-phase AC load-flow constraint violations within 15 minutes of training on a single workstation-class NVIDIA RTX PRO 5000 Blackwell 48GB GPU. This is a 3--5x training speed-up over gradient-based self-supervised learning benchmarks and substantially better training efficiency than multi-agent reinforcement-learning benchmarks. In out-of-sample tests, GradMAP also delivers among the lowest operating cost and constraint violations.

Large Language Model Interface for Home Energy Management Systems

Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) help households tailor their electricity usage based on power system signals such as energy prices. This technology helps to reduce energy bills and offers greater demand-side flexibility that supports the power system stability. However, residents who lack a technical background may find it difficult to use HEMSs effectively, because HEMSs require well-formatted parameterization that reflects the characteristics of the energy resources, houses, and users' needs. Recently, Large-Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated an outstanding ability in language understanding. Motivated by this, we propose an LLM-based interface that interacts with users to understand and parameterize their ``badly-formatted answers'', and then outputs well-formatted parameters to implement an HEMS. We further use Reason and Act method (ReAct) and few-shot prompting to enhance the LLM performance. Evaluating the interface performance requires multiple user--LLM interactions. To avoid the efforts in finding volunteer users and reduce the evaluation time, we additionally propose a method that uses another LLM to simulate users with varying expertise, ranging from knowledgeable to non-technical. By comprehensive evaluation, the proposed LLM-based HEMS interface achieves an average parameter retrieval accuracy of 88\%, outperforming benchmark models without ReAct and/or few-shot prompting.