GRNN-Based Real-Time Fault Chain Prediction

Abstract

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.