Shimiao Li

Shimiao Li, Amritanshu Pandey, Larry Pileggi

When applied to a real-world safety critical system like the power grid, general machine learning methods suffer from expensive training, non-physical solutions, and limited interpretability. To address these challenges for power grids, many recent works have explored the inclusion of grid physics (i.e., domain expertise) into their method design, primarily through including system constraints and technical limits, reducing search space and defining meaningful features in latent space. Yet, there is no general methodology to evaluate the practicality of these approaches in power grid tasks, and limitations exist regarding scalability, generalization, interpretability, etc. This work formalizes a new concept of physical interpretability which assesses how a ML model makes predictions in a physically meaningful way and introduces an evaluation methodology that identifies a set of attributes that a practical method should satisfy. Inspired by the evaluation attributes, the paper further develops a novel contingency analysis warm starter for MadIoT cyberattack, based on a conditional Gaussian random field. This method serves as an instance of an ML model that can incorporate diverse domain knowledge and improve on these identified attributes. Experiments validate that the warm starter significantly boosts the efficiency of contingency analysis for MadIoT attack even with shallow NN architectures.

Shimiao Li, Aaron Tuor, Draguna Vrabie et al.

Learning to optimize (L2O) parametric approximations of AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) solutions offers the potential for fast, reusable decision-making in real-time power system operations. However, the inherent nonconvexity of AC-OPF results in challenging optimization landscapes, and standard learning approaches often fail to converge to feasible, high-quality solutions. This work introduces a \textit{homotopy-guided self-supervised L2O method} for parametric AC-OPF problems. The key idea is to construct a continuous deformation of the objective and constraints during training, beginning from a relaxed problem with a broad basin of attraction and gradually transforming it toward the original problem. The resulting learning process improves convergence stability and promotes feasibility without requiring labeled optimal solutions or external solvers. We evaluate the proposed method on standard IEEE AC-OPF benchmarks and show that homotopy-guided L2O significantly increases feasibility rates compared to non-homotopy baselines, while achieving objective values comparable to full OPF solvers. These findings demonstrate the promise of homotopy-based heuristics for scalable, constraint-aware L2O in power system optimization.

Shimiao Li, Jan Drgona, Shrirang Abhyankar et al.

Recent years have seen a rich literature of data-driven approaches designed for power grid applications. However, insufficient consideration of domain knowledge can impose a high risk to the practicality of the methods. Specifically, ignoring the grid-specific spatiotemporal patterns (in load, generation, and topology, etc.) can lead to outputting infeasible, unrealizable, or completely meaningless predictions on new inputs. To address this concern, this paper investigates real-world operational data to provide insights into power grid behavioral patterns, including the time-varying topology, load, and generation, as well as the spatial differences (in peak hours, diverse styles) between individual loads and generations. Then based on these observations, we evaluate the generalization risks in some existing ML works causedby ignoring these grid-specific patterns in model design and training.

Swadesh Vhakta, Denis Osipov, Reetam Sen Biswas et al.

This paper aims to proactively diagnose and manage frequency instability risks from a steady-state perspective, without the need for derivative-dependent transient modeling. Specifically, we jointly address two questions (Q1) Survivability: following a disturbance and the subsequent primary frequency response, can the system settle into a healthy steady state (feasible with an acceptable frequency deviation $Δf$)? (Q2) Dominant Vulnerability: if found unstable, what critical vulnerabilities create instability and/or full collapse? To address these questions, we first augment steady-state power flow states to include frequency-dependent governor relationships (i.e., governor power flow). Afterwards, we propose a frequency-aware sparse optimization that finds the minimal set of bus locations with measurable compensations (corrective actions) to enforce power balance and maintain frequency within predefined/acceptable bounds. We evaluate our method on standard transmission systems to empirically validate its ability to localize dominant sources of vulnerabilities. For a 1354-bus large system, our method detects compensations to only four buses under N-1 generation outage (3424.8 MW) while enforcing a maximum allowable steady-state frequency drop of 0.06 Hz (otherwise, frequency drops by nearly 0.08 Hz). We further validate the scalability of our method, requiring less than four minutes to obtain sparse solutions for the 1354-bus system.

Seyyedali Hosseinalipour, Shimiao Li, Adedoyin Inaolaji et al.

The recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 has marked a significant paradigm shift in machine learning. Trained on massive corpora of data, these models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in language understanding, generation, summarization, and reasoning, transforming how intelligent systems process and interact with human language. Although LLMs may still seem like a recent breakthrough, the field is already witnessing the rise of a new and more general category: multi-modal, multi-task foundation models (M3T FMs). These models go beyond language and can process heterogeneous data types/modalities, such as time-series measurements, audio, imagery, tabular records, and unstructured logs, while supporting a broad range of downstream tasks spanning forecasting, classification, control, and retrieval. When combined with federated learning (FL), they give rise to M3T Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs): a highly recent and largely unexplored class of models that enable scalable, privacy-preserving model training/fine-tuning across distributed data sources. In this paper, we take one of the first steps toward introducing these models to the power systems research community by offering a bidirectional perspective: (i) M3T FedFMs for smart grids and (ii) smart grids for FedFMs. In the former, we explore how M3T FedFMs can enhance key grid functions, such as load/demand forecasting and fault detection, by learning from distributed, heterogeneous data available at the grid edge in a privacy-preserving manner. In the latter, we investigate how the constraints and structure of smart grids, spanning energy, communication, and regulatory dimensions, shape the design, training, and deployment of M3T FedFMs.

Shimiao Li

The growing threats of uncertainties, anomalies, and cyberattacks on power grids are driving a critical need to advance situational awareness which allows system operators to form a complete and accurate picture of the present and future state. Simulation and estimation are foundational tools in this process. However, existing tools lack the robustness and efficiency required to achieve the level of situational awareness needed for the ever-evolving threat landscape. Industry-standard (steady-state) simulators are not robust to blackouts, often leading to non-converging or non-actionable results. Estimation tools lack robustness to anomalous data, returning erroneous system states. Efficiency is the other major concern as nonlinearities and scalability issues make large systems slow to converge. This thesis addresses robustness and efficiency gaps through a dual-fold contribution. We first address the inherent limitations in the existing physics-based and data-driven worlds; and then transcend the boundaries of conventional algorithmic design in the direction of a new paradigm -- Physics-ML Synergy -- which integrates the strengths of the two worlds. Our approaches are built on circuit formulation which provides a unified framework that applies to both transmission and distribution. Sparse optimization acts as the key enabler to make these tools intrinsically robust and immune to random threats, pinpointing dominant sources of (random) blackouts and data errors. Further, we explore sparsity-exploiting optimizations to develop lightweight ML models whose prediction and detection capabilities are a complement to physics-based tools; and whose lightweight designs advance generalization and scalability. Finally, Physics-ML Synergy brings robustness and efficiency further against targeted cyberthreats, by interconnecting our physics-based tools with lightweight ML.

Shimiao Li, Amritanshu Pandey, Bryan Hooi et al.

Given sensor readings over time from a power grid, how can we accurately detect when an anomaly occurs? A key part of achieving this goal is to use the network of power grid sensors to quickly detect, in real-time, when any unusual events, whether natural faults or malicious, occur on the power grid. Existing bad-data detectors in the industry lack the sophistication to robustly detect broad types of anomalies, especially those due to emerging cyber-attacks, since they operate on a single measurement snapshot of the grid at a time. New ML methods are more widely applicable, but generally do not consider the impact of topology change on sensor measurements and thus cannot accommodate regular topology adjustments in historical data. Hence, we propose DYNWATCH, a domain knowledge based and topology-aware algorithm for anomaly detection using sensors placed on a dynamic grid. Our approach is accurate, outperforming existing approaches by 20% or more (F-measure) in experiments; and fast, running in less than 1.7ms on average per time tick per sensor on a 60K+ branch case using a laptop computer, and scaling linearly in the size of the graph.