Jérôme Picault

Jérôme Picault, Clément Goubet

This position paper explores how Agentic AI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) can support power-grid studies in a Transmission System Operator (TSO) context. We focus on integrating Large Language Models with numerical simulation tools, structured workflows, and human supervision. We identify key industrial requirements for agent assisted grid studies and introduce pypowsybl-mcp, an MCP-based interface exposing selected capabilities of our simulation tool, pypowsybl to AI agents. This first step provides a testbed to study how agents can setup simulations, execute analyses, retrieve results, and interact with power-system simulators through standardized tool calls. We also discuss principles for human-in-the-loop, multi-agent workflows and outline an evaluation strategy combining technical metrics and practitioner feedback. The paper positions MCP-based tool integration as a step toward more interactive, auditable, and scalable grid-study environments.

Allaa Boutaleb, Jerome Picault, Guillaume Grosjean

Detecting and tracking emerging trends and weak signals in large, evolving text corpora is vital for applications such as monitoring scientific literature, managing brand reputation, surveilling critical infrastructure and more generally to any kind of text-based event detection. Existing solutions often fail to capture the nuanced context or dynamically track evolving patterns over time. BERTrend, a novel method, addresses these limitations using neural topic modeling in an online setting. It introduces a new metric to quantify topic popularity over time by considering both the number of documents and update frequency. This metric classifies topics as noise, weak, or strong signals, flagging emerging, rapidly growing topics for further investigation. Experimentation on two large real-world datasets demonstrates BERTrend's ability to accurately detect and track meaningful weak signals while filtering out noise, offering a comprehensive solution for monitoring emerging trends in large-scale, evolving text corpora. The method can also be used for retrospective analysis of past events. In addition, the use of Large Language Models together with BERTrend offers efficient means for the interpretability of trends of events.

Milad Leyli-abadi, Antoine Marot, Jérôme Picault

In the context of the energy transition, with increasing integration of renewable sources and cross-border electricity exchanges, power grids are encountering greater uncertainty and operational risk. Maintaining grid stability under varying conditions is a complex task, and power flow simulators are commonly used to support operators by evaluating potential actions before implementation. However, traditional physical solvers, while accurate, are often too slow for near real-time use. Machine learning models have emerged as fast surrogates, and to improve their adherence to physical laws (e.g., Kirchhoff's laws), they are often trained with embedded constraints which are also known as physics-informed or hybrid models. This paper presents an ablation study to demystify hybridization strategies, ranging from incorporating physical constraints as regularization terms or unsupervised losses, and exploring model architectures from simple multilayer perceptrons to advanced graph-based networks enabling the direct optimization of physics equations. Using our custom benchmarking pipeline for hybrid models called LIPS, we evaluate these models across four dimensions: accuracy, physical compliance, industrial readiness, and out-of-distribution generalization. The results highlight how integrating physical knowledge impacts performance across these criteria. All the implementations are reproducible and provided in the corresponding Github page.

Milad Leyli-Abadi, Jérôme Picault, Antoine Marot et al.

This paper addresses the growing computational challenges of power grid simulations, particularly with the increasing integration of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. As grid operators must analyze significantly more scenarios in near real-time to prevent failures and ensure stability, traditional physical-based simulations become computationally impractical. To tackle this, a competition was organized to develop AI-driven methods that accelerate power flow simulations by at least an order of magnitude while maintaining operational reliability. This competition utilized a regional-scale grid model with a 30\% renewable energy mix, mirroring the anticipated near-future composition of the French power grid. A key contribution of this work is through the use of LIPS (Learning Industrial Physical Systems), a benchmarking framework that evaluates solutions based on four critical dimensions: machine learning performance, physical compliance, industrial readiness, and generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the Machine Learning for Physical Simulation (ML4PhySim) competition, detailing the benchmark suite, analyzing top-performing solutions that outperformed traditional simulation methods, and sharing key organizational insights and best practices for running large-scale AI competitions. Given the promising results achieved, the study aims to inspire further research into more efficient, scalable, and sustainable power network simulation methodologies.