HUGO -- Highlighting Unseen Grid Options: Combining Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Heuristic Target Topology Approach

With the growth of Renewable Energy (RE) generation, the operation of power grids has become increasingly complex. One solution is automated grid operation, where Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has repeatedly shown significant potential in Learning to Run a Power Network (L2RPN) challenges. However, only individual actions at the substation level have been subjected to topology optimization by most existing DRL algorithms. In contrast, we propose a more holistic approach in this paper by proposing specific Target Topologies (TTs) as actions. These topologies are selected based on their robustness. As part of this paper, we present a search algorithm to find the TTs and upgrade our previously developed DRL agent CurriculumAgent (CAgent) to a novel topology agent. We compare the upgrade to the previous CAgent agent and can increase their scores significantly by 10%. Further, we achieve a 25% better median survival with our TTs included. Later analysis shows that almost all TTs are close to the base topology, explaining their robustness.