Date: 6 October 2023, Friday
Time: 4:30pm
Venue: YEUNG Building Y5-303, City University of Hong Kong
Zoom Meeting ID: 967 1968 0176
Password: 123456
Speaker: Dr Xi Zhang, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing
Mitigating Cascading Failure in Power Networks Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning
Dr Xi Zhang, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing
Abstract: Power grids are susceptible to cascading failures, which can have catastrophic consequences for modern society. Remedial actions, such as proactive islanding, generator tripping, and load shedding, offer a viable solution to mitigate cascading failures in power grids. The key to the success of this solution lies in generating timely and appropriate remedial actions during the rapid propagation process of cascading failure.
This presentation introduces an intelligent method that leverages deep reinforcement learning to generate remedial actions. A simulation model of cascading failure is presented, considering power flow distributions and the probabilistic failure mechanisms of components to accurately depict the dynamic cascading failure process. Based on this model, a Markov decision process is formulated to address the problem of selecting appropriate remedial actions during the cascading failure process. The Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm is utilized to generate effective remedial actions. Experiments are conducted on representative power test cases, and the results demonstrate the proposed method’s ability to significantly reduce the affected area in the event of the same initial failure, thereby showcasing its advantages in mitigating cascading failure in power grids.
Speaker’s Bio: Dr Xi Zhang received the BEng degree in Automation from Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, China, in 2013, and the PhD degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China, in 2017. He is currently an assistant professor at the School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China. His research interests focus on power system resilience, application of AI technologies to the analysis and decision-making in power networks, etc. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs. He served as a Guest Editor for IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems in 2023 and the secretary of the IEEE PES Beijing Chapter from 2018 to 2019.
