Qiuzhuang Sun

Haoran Ye, Qiuzhuang Sun, Yang Yang

This study develops a SARIMAX-based prediction system for short-term power outage forecasting during extreme weather events. Using hourly data from Michigan counties with outage counts and comprehensive weather features, we implement a systematic two-stage feature engineering pipeline: data cleaning to remove zero-variance and unknown features, followed by correlation-based filtering to eliminate highly correlated predictors. The selected features are augmented with temporal embeddings, multi-scale lag features, and weather variables with their corresponding lags as exogenous inputs to the SARIMAX model. To address data irregularity and numerical instability, we apply standardization and implement a hierarchical fitting strategy with sequential optimization methods, automatic downgrading to ARIMA when convergence fails, and historical mean-based fallback predictions as a final safeguard. The model is optimized separately for short-term (24 hours) and medium-term (48 hours) forecast horizons using RMSE as the evaluation metric. Our approach achieves an RMSE of 177.2, representing an 8.4\% improvement over the baseline method (RMSE = 193.4), thereby validating the effectiveness of our feature engineering and robust optimization strategy for extreme weather-related outage prediction.

Jianyu Xu, Qiuzhuang Sun, Yang Yang et al.

The 2019-20 Australia bushfire incurred numerous economic losses and significantly affected the operations of power systems. A power station or transmission line can be significantly affected due to bushfires, leading to an increase in operational costs. We study a fundamental but challenging problem of planning the optimal power flow (OPF) for power systems subject to bushfires. Considering the stochastic nature of bushfire spread, we develop a model to capture such dynamics based on Moore's neighborhood model. Under a periodic inspection scheme that reveals the in-situ bushfire status, we propose an online optimization modeling framework that sequentially plans the power flows in the electricity network. Our framework assumes that the spread of bushfires is non-stationary over time, and the spread and containment probabilities are unknown. To meet these challenges, we develop a contextual online learning algorithm that treats the in-situ geographical information of the bushfire as a 'spatial context'. The online learning algorithm learns the unknown probabilities sequentially based on the observed data and then makes the OPF decision accordingly. The sequential OPF decisions aim to minimize the regret function, which is defined as the cumulative loss against the clairvoyant strategy that knows the true model parameters. We provide a theoretical guarantee of our algorithm by deriving a bound on the regret function, which outperforms the regret bound achieved by other benchmark algorithms. Our model assumptions are verified by the real bushfire data from NSW, Australia, and we apply our model to two power systems to illustrate its applicability.