Data-driven Power Flow Linearization: Simulation

TL;DR

This paper conducts extensive numerical testing of data-driven power flow linearization methods, comparing over 30 approaches across various test cases to identify performance trends, gaps, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive numerical comparison of numerous DPFL methods, including new techniques, across diverse scenarios, addressing gaps in open-source code and practical performance insights.

Findings

Identifies performance differences among DPFL methods.

Highlights gaps between theoretical and real-world performance.

Suggests future research directions in DPFL.

Abstract

Building on the theoretical insights of Part I, this paper, as the second part of the tutorial, dives deeper into data-driven power flow linearization (DPFL), focusing on comprehensive numerical testing. The necessity of these simulations stems from the theoretical analysis's inherent limitations, particularly the challenge of identifying the differences in real-world performance among DPFL methods with overlapping theoretical capabilities and/or limitations. The absence of a comprehensive numerical comparison of DPFL approaches in the literature also motivates this paper, especially given the fact that over 95% of existing DPFL studies have not provided any open-source codes. To bridge the gap, this paper first reviews existing DPFL experiments, examining the adopted test scenarios, load fluctuation settings, data sources, considerations for data noise/outliers, and the comparison made so far. Subsequently, this paper evaluates a total of 44 methods, containing over 30 existing DPFL approaches, some innovative DPFL techniques, and several classic physics-driven power flow linearization methods for benchmarking. The evaluation spans various dimensions, including generalizability, applicability, accuracy, and computational efficiency, using various different test cases scaling from 9-bus to 1354-bus systems. The numerical analysis identifies and examines significant trends and consistent findings across all methods under various test cases. It also offers theoretical insights into phenomena like under-performance, failure, excessive computation times, etc. Overall, this paper identifies the differences in the performances of the wide range of DPFL methods, reveals gaps not evident from theoretical discussions, assists in method selection for real-world applications, and provides thorough discussions on open questions within DPFL research, indicating ten potential future directions.