Machine learning for OPF
Presentations
21/03/2023, Cambridge - Munich, Zeiss meeting
19/03/2021, Cambridge - Rio de Janeiro, PSR meeting
Articles
Leveraging power grid topology in machine learning assisted optimal power flowT Falconer and L Mones
2022, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, arXiv
Abstract: Machine learning assisted optimal power flow (OPF) aims to reduce the computational complexity of these non-linear and non-convex constrained optimization problems by consigning expensive (online) optimization to offline training. The majority of work in this area typically employs fully connected neural networks (FCNN). However, recently convolutional (CNN) and graph (GNN) neural networks have also been investigated, in effort to exploit topological information within the power grid. Although promising results have been obtained, there lacks a systematic comparison between these architectures throughout literature. Accordingly, we introduce a concise framework for generalizing methods for machine learning assisted OPF and assess the performance of a variety of FCNN, CNN and GNN models for two fundamental approaches in this domain: regression (predicting optimal generator set-points) and classification (predicting the active set of constraints). For several synthetic power grids with interconnected utilities, we show that locality properties between feature and target variables are scarce and subsequently demonstrate marginal utility of applying CNN and GNN architectures compared to FCNN for a fixed grid topology. However, with variable topology (for instance, modeling transmission line contingency), GNN models are able to straightforwardly take the change of topological information into account and outperform both FCNN and CNN models.
Deep learning architectures for inference of AC-OPF solutions
T Falconer and L Mones
2020, NeurIPS, Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, arXiv
Abstract: We present a systematic comparison between neural network (NN) architectures for inference of AC-OPF solutions. Using fully connected NNs as a baseline we demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging network topology in the models by constructing abstract representations of electrical grids in the graph domain, for both convolutional and graph NNs. The performance of the NN architectures is compared for regression (predicting optimal generator set-points) and classification (predicting the active set of constraints) settings. Computational gains for obtaining optimal solutions are also presented.
Learning an Optimally Reduced Formulation of OPF through Meta-optimization
A Robson, M Jamei, C Ududec and L Mones
2019, arXiv
Abstract: With increasing share of renewables in power generation mix, system operators would need to run Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems closer to real-time to better manage uncertainty. Given that OPF is an expensive optimization problem to solve, shifting computational effort away from real-time to offline training by machine learning techniques has become an intense research area. In this paper, we introduce a method for solving OPF problems, which can substantially reduce solve times of the two-step hybrid techniques that comprise of a neural network with a subsequent OPF step guaranteeing optimal solutions. A neural network that predicts the binding status of constraints of the system is used to generate an initial reduced OPF problem, defined by removing the predicted non-binding constraints. This reduced model is then extended in an iterative manner until guaranteeing an optimal solution to the full OPF problem. The classifier is trained using a meta-loss objective, defined by the total computational cost of solving the reduced OPF problems constructed during the iterative procedure. Using a wide range of DC- and AC-OPF problems, we demonstrate that optimizing this meta-loss objective results in a classifier that significantly outperforms conventional loss functions used to train neural network classifiers. We also provide an extensive analysis of the investigated grids as well as an empirical limit of performance of machine learning techniques providing optimal OPF solutions.
Meta-Optimization of Optimal Power Flow
M Jamei, L Mones, A Robson, L White, J Requeima and C Ududec
2019, ICML Workshop, Climate Change: How Can AI Help
Abstract: The planning and operation of electricity grids is carried out by solving various forms of constrained optimization problems. With the increasing variability of system conditions due to the integration of renewable and other distributed energy resources, such optimization problems are growing in complexity and need to be repeated daily, often limited to a 5 minute solve-time. To address this, we propose a meta-optimizer that is used to initialize interior-point solvers. This can significantly reduce the number of iterations to converge to optimality.