RL for Mitigating Cascading Failures: Targeted Exploration via Sensitivity Factors

Electricity grid's resiliency and climate change strongly impact one another due to an array of technical and policy-related decisions that impact both. This paper introduces a physics-informed machine learning-based framework to enhance grid's resiliency. Specifically, when encountering disruptive events, this paper designs remedial control actions to prevent blackouts. The proposed Physics-Guided Reinforcement Learning (PG-RL) framework determines effective real-time remedial line-switching actions, considering their impact on power balance, system security, and grid reliability. To identify an effective blackout mitigation policy, PG-RL leverages power-flow sensitivity factors to guide the RL exploration during agent training. Comprehensive evaluations using the Grid2Op platform demonstrate that incorporating physical signals into RL significantly improves resource utilization within electric grids and achieves better blackout mitigation policies - both of which are critical in addressing climate change.

Cascading Failure Prediction via Causal Inference

Causal inference provides an analytical framework to identify and quantify cause-and-effect relationships among a network of interacting agents. This paper offers a novel framework for analyzing cascading failures in power transmission networks. This framework generates a directed latent graph in which the nodes represent the transmission lines and the directed edges encode the cause-effect relationships. This graph has a structure distinct from the system's topology, signifying the intricate fact that both local and non-local interdependencies exist among transmission lines, which are more general than only the local interdependencies that topological graphs can present. This paper formalizes a causal inference framework for predicting how an emerging anomaly propagates throughout the system. Using this framework, two algorithms are designed, providing an analytical framework to identify the most likely and most costly cascading scenarios. The framework's effectiveness is evaluated compared to the pertinent literature on the IEEE 14-bus, 39-bus, and 118-bus systems.

Blackout Mitigation via Physics-guided RL

This paper considers the sequential design of remedial control actions in response to system anomalies for the ultimate objective of preventing blackouts. A physics-guided reinforcement learning (RL) framework is designed to identify effective sequences of real-time remedial look-ahead decisions accounting for the long-term impact on the system's stability. The paper considers a space of control actions that involve both discrete-valued transmission line-switching decisions (line reconnections and removals) and continuous-valued generator adjustments. To identify an effective blackout mitigation policy, a physics-guided approach is designed that uses power-flow sensitivity factors associated with the power transmission network to guide the RL exploration during agent training. Comprehensive empirical evaluations using the open-source Grid2Op platform demonstrate the notable advantages of incorporating physical signals into RL decisions, establishing the gains of the proposed physics-guided approach compared to its black box counterparts. One important observation is that strategically~\emph{removing} transmission lines, in conjunction with multiple real-time generator adjustments, often renders effective long-term decisions that are likely to prevent or delay blackouts.

GRNN-based Real-time Fault Chain Prediction

This paper proposes a data-driven graphical framework for the real-time search of risky cascading fault chains (FCs). While identifying risky FCs is pivotal to alleviating cascading failures, the complex spatio-temporal dependencies among the components of the power system render challenges to modeling and analyzing FCs. Furthermore, the real-time search of risky FCs faces an inherent combinatorial complexity that grows exponentially with the size of the system. The proposed framework leverages the recent advances in graph recurrent neural networks to circumvent the computational complexities of the real-time search of FCs. The search process is formalized as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), which is subsequently solved via a time-varying graph recurrent neural network (GRNN) that judiciously accounts for the inherent temporal and spatial structures of the data generated by the system. The key features of this structure include (i) leveraging the spatial structure of the data induced by the system topology, (ii) leveraging the temporal structure of data induced by system dynamics, and (iii) efficiently summarizing the system's history in the latent space of the GRNN. The proposed framework's efficiency is compared to the relevant literature on the IEEE 39-bus New England system and the IEEE 118-bus system.