Flow-based Polynomial Chaos Expansion for Uncertainty Quantification in Power System Dynamic Simulation
This addresses uncertainty quantification for power system operators dealing with renewable energy integration, offering a novel hybrid method that is incremental in combining existing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of accurately quantifying uncertainty in power system dynamic simulations by introducing flow-based Polynomial Chaos Expansion, which integrates normalizing flows to model complex input distributions and improves surrogate accuracy, achieving significant error reductions in benchmark tests.
The large-scale integration of renewable energy sources introduces significant operational uncertainty into power systems. Although Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) provides an efficient tool for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in power system dynamics, its accuracy depends critically on the faithful representation of input uncertainty, an assumption that is oftern violated in practice due to correlated, non-Gaussian, and otherwise complex data distributions. In contrast to purely data-driven surrogates that often overlook rigorous input distribution modelling, this paper introduces flow-based PCE, a unified framework that couples expressive input modelling with efficient uncertainty propagation. Specifically, normalising flows are employed to learn an invertible transport map from a simple base distribution to the empirical joint distribution of uncertain inputs, and this map is then integrated directly into the PCE construction. In addition, the Map Smoothness Index (MSI) is introduced as a new metric to quantify the quality of the learned map, and smoother transformations are shown to yield more accurate PCE surrogates. The proposed Flow-based PCE framework is validated on benchmark dynamic models, including the IEEE 14-bus system and the Great Britain transmission system, under a range of uncertainty scenarios.