arXiv subjects

Timon Conrad

Publications and source records attributed to Timon Conrad.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Impact of Training Dataset Size for ML Load Flow Surrogates

Efficient and accurate load flow calculations are a bedrock of modern power system operation. Classical numerical methods such as the Newton-Raphson algorithm provide highly precise results but are computationally demanding, which limits their applicability in large-scale scenario studies and optimization in time-critical contexts. Research has shown that machine learning approaches can approximate load flow results with high accuracy while substantially reducing computation time. Sample efficiency, i.e., the ability to achieve high accuracy with limited training dataset size, is still insufficiently researched, especially in grids with a fixed topology. This paper presents a systematic investigation of the sample efficiency of a Multilayer Perceptron and two Graph Neural Network variants on a dataset based on a modified IEEE 5-bus system. The results for this grid size show that Graph Neural Networks achieve the lowest losses. However, the availability of large training datasets remains the dominant factor influencing performance compared to architecture choice.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2026

Parameter-Efficient Domain Adaptation of Physics-Informed Self-Attention based GNNs for AC Power Flow Prediction

Accurate AC power flow (AC-PF) prediction under domain shift is critical when models trained on medium-voltage (MV) grids are deployed on high-voltage (HV) networks. Existing physics-informed graph neural network (GNN) solvers typically rely on full fine-tuning for cross-regime transfer, incurring high retraining cost and offering limited control over the stability-plasticity trade-off between target-domain adaptation and source-domain retention. We study parameter-efficient domain adaptation for physics-informed self-attention-based GNNs, encouraging Kirchhoff-consistent behavior via a physics-based loss while restricting adaptation to low-rank updates. Specifically, we apply low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to attention projections with selective unfreezing of the prediction head to regulate adaptation capacity. This design yields a controllable efficiency-accuracy trade-off for physics-constrained inverse estimation under voltage-regime shift. Across multiple grid topologies, the proposed LoRA+PHead adaptation recovers near-full fine-tuning accuracy with a target-domain RMSE gap of $2.6 \times 10^{-4}$ while reducing the number of trainable parameters by $85.46\%$. The physics-based residual remains comparable to full fine-tuning; however, relative to Full FT, LoRA+PHead reduces MV source retention by 4.7 percentage points (17.9% vs. 22.6%) under domain shift, while still enabling parameter-efficient and physically consistent AC-PF estimation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Physics-informed GNN for medium-high voltage AC power flow with edge-aware attention and line search correction operator

Physics-informed graph neural networks (PIGNNs) have emerged as fast AC power-flow solvers that can replace the classic NewtonRaphson (NR) solvers, especially when thousands of scenarios must be evaluated. However, current PIGNNs still need accuracy improvements at parity speed; in particular, the soft constraint on the physics loss is inoperative at inference, which can deter operational adoption. We address this with PIGNN-Attn-LS, combining an edge-aware attention mechanism that explicitly encodes line physics via per-edge biases to form a fully differentiable knownoperator layer inside the computation graph, with a backtracking line-search-based globalized correction operator that restores an operative decrease criterion at inference. Training and testing use a realistic High-/Medium-Voltage scenario generator, with NR used only to construct reference states. On held-out HV cases consisting of 4-32-bus grids, PIGNN-Attn-LS achieves a test RMSE of 0.00033 p.u. in voltage and 0.08 deg in angle, outperforming the PIGNN-MLP baseline by 99.5% and 87.1%, respectively. With streaming micro-batches, it delivers 2-5x faster batched inference than NR on 4-1024-bus grids.

cs.LG↗