Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Physics-Aware Grid Learning Algorithms

This paper proposes novel architectures for spatio-temporal graph convolutional and recurrent neural networks whose structure is inspired by the physics of power systems. The key insight behind our design consists in deriving the so-called graph shift operator (GSO), which is the cornerstone of Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN) and Graph Recursive Neural Network (GRN) designs, from the power flow equations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architectures in two applications: in forecasting the power grid state and in finding a stochastic policy for foresighted voltage control using deep reinforcement learning. Since our design can be adopted in single-phase as well as three-phase unbalanced systems, we test our architecture in both environments. For state forecasting experiments we consider the single phase IEEE 118-bus case systems; for voltage regulation, we illustrate the performance of deep reinforcement learning policy on the unbalanced three-phase IEEE 123-bus feeder system. In both cases the physics based GCN and GRN learning algorithms we propose outperform the state of the art.