DeepOPF: Deep Neural Network for DC Optimal Power Flow
This work addresses the need for faster DC-OPF solutions in power system operations, offering a significant speedup with maintained solution quality.
DeepOPF uses a deep neural network to learn the mapping from load inputs to optimal dispatch decisions for DC optimal power flow, achieving solutions with negligible optimality loss while speeding up computation by two orders of magnitude compared to conventional solvers.
We develop DeepOPF as a Deep Neural Network (DNN) approach for solving direct current optimal power flow (DC-OPF) problems. DeepOPF is inspired by the observation that solving DC-OPF for a given power network is equivalent to characterizing a high-dimensional mapping between the load inputs and the dispatch and transmission decisions. We construct and train a DNN model to learn such mapping, then we apply it to obtain optimized operating decisions upon arbitrary load inputs. We adopt uniform sampling to address the over-fitting problem common in generic DNN approaches. We leverage on a useful structure in DC-OPF to significantly reduce the mapping dimension, subsequently cutting down the size of our DNN model and the amount of training data/time needed. We also design a post-processing procedure to ensure the feasibility of the obtained solution. Simulation results of IEEE test cases show that DeepOPF always generates feasible solutions with negligible optimality loss, while speeding up the computing time by two orders of magnitude as compared to conventional approaches implemented in a state-of-the-art solver.