Rabab Haider

Rabab Haider, Anuradha M. Annaswamy

Mixed integer problems are ubiquitous in decision making, from discrete device settings and design parameters, unit production, and on/off or yes/no decision in switches, routing, and social networks. Despite their prevalence, classical optimization approaches for combinatorial optimization remain prohibitively slow for fast and accurate decision making in dynamic and safety-critical environments with hard constraints. To address this gap, we propose SiPhyR (pronounced: cipher), a physics-informed machine learning framework for end-to-end learning to optimize for combinatorial problems. SiPhyR employs a novel physics-informed rounding approach to tackle the challenge of combinatorial optimization within a differentiable framework that has certified satisfiability of safety-critical constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SiPhyR on an emerging paradigm for clean energy systems: dynamic reconfiguration, where the topology of the electric grid and power flow are optimized so as to maintain a safe and reliable power grid in the presence of intermittent renewable generation. Offline training of the unsupervised framework on representative load and generation data makes dynamic decision making via the online application of Grid-SiPhyR computationally feasible.

Jules Authier, Rabab Haider, Anuradha Annaswamy et al.

To maintain a reliable grid we need fast decision-making algorithms for complex problems like Dynamic Reconfiguration (DyR). DyR optimizes distribution grid switch settings in real-time to minimize grid losses and dispatches resources to supply loads with available generation. DyR is a mixed-integer problem and can be computationally intractable to solve for large grids and at fast timescales. We propose GraPhyR, a Physics-Informed Graph Neural Network (GNNs) framework tailored for DyR. We incorporate essential operational and connectivity constraints directly within the GNN framework and train it end-to-end. Our results show that GraPhyR is able to learn to optimize the DyR task.

Dekang Meng, Rabab Haider, Pascal van Hentenryck

This paper introduces OptiGridML, a machine learning framework for discrete topology optimization in power grids. The task involves selecting substation breaker configurations that maximize cross-region power exports, a problem typically formulated as a mixed-integer program (MIP) that is NP-hard and computationally intractable for large networks. OptiGridML replaces repeated MIP solves with a two-stage neural architecture: a line-graph neural network (LGNN) that approximates DC power flows for a given network topology, and a heterogeneous GNN (HeteroGNN) that predicts breaker states under structural and physical constraints. A physics-informed consistency loss connects these components by enforcing Kirchhoff's law on predicted flows. Experiments on synthetic networks with up to 1,000 breakers show that OptiGridML achieves power export improvements of up to 18% over baseline topologies, while reducing inference time from hours to milliseconds. These results demonstrate the potential of structured, flow-aware GNNs for accelerating combinatorial optimization in physical networked systems.