Physics-Guided Deep Neural Networks for Power Flow Analysis

Abstract: Solving power flow (PF) equations is the basis of power flow analysis, which is important in determining the best operation of existing systems, performing security analysis, etc. However, PF equations can be out-of-date or even unavailable due to system dynamics and uncertainties, making traditional numerical approaches infeasible. To address these concerns, researchers have proposed data-driven approaches to solve the PF problem by learning the mapping rules from historical system operation data. Nevertheless, prior data-driven approaches suffer from poor performance and generalizability, due to overly simplified assumptions of the PF problem or ignorance of physical laws governing power systems. In this paper, we propose a physics-guided neural network to solve the PF problem, with an auxiliary task to rebuild the PF model. By encoding different granularity of Kirchhoff's laws and system topology into the rebuilt PF model, our neural-network based PF solver is regularized by the auxiliary task and constrained by the physical laws. The simulation results show that our physics-guided neural network methods achieve better performance and generalizability compared to existing unconstrained data-driven approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the weight matrices of our physics-guided neural networks embody power system physics by showing their similarities with the bus admittance matrices.