EV2Gym: A Flexible V2G Simulator for EV Smart Charging Research and Benchmarking

As electric vehicle (EV) numbers rise, concerns about the capacity of current charging and power grid infrastructure grow, necessitating the development of smart charging solutions. While many smart charging simulators have been developed in recent years, only a few support the development of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in the form of a Gym environment, and those that do usually lack depth in modeling Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) scenarios. To address the aforementioned issues, this paper introduces the EV2Gym, a realistic simulator platform for the development and assessment of small and large-scale smart charging algorithms within a standardized platform. The proposed simulator is populated with comprehensive EV, charging station, power transformer, and EV behavior models validated using real data. EV2Gym has a highly customizable interface empowering users to choose from pre-designed case studies or craft their own customized scenarios to suit their specific requirements. Moreover, it incorporates a diverse array of RL, mathematical programming, and heuristic algorithms to speed up the development and benchmarking of new solutions. By offering a unified and standardized platform, EV2Gym aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a robust environment for advancing and assessing smart charging algorithms.

Quantum Neural Networks for Power Flow Analysis

This paper explores the potential application of quantum and hybrid quantum-classical neural networks in power flow analysis. Experiments are conducted using two small-size datasets based on the IEEE 4-bus and 33-bus test systems. A systematic performance comparison is also conducted among quantum, hybrid quantum-classical, and classical neural networks. The comparison is based on (i) generalization ability, (ii) robustness, (iii) training dataset size needed, (iv) training error. (v) training computational time, and (vi) training process stability. The results show that the developed quantum-classical neural network outperforms both quantum and classical neural networks, and hence can improve deep learning-based power flow analysis in the noisy-intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era.

Stable Training of Probabilistic Models Using the Leave-One-Out Maximum Log-Likelihood Objective

Probabilistic modelling of power systems operation and planning processes depends on data-driven methods, which require sufficiently large datasets. When historical data lacks this, it is desired to model the underlying data generation mechanism as a probability distribution to assess the data quality and generate more data, if needed. Kernel density estimation (KDE) based models are popular choices for this task, but they fail to adapt to data regions with varying densities. In this paper, an adaptive KDE model is employed to circumvent this, where each kernel in the model has an individual bandwidth. The leave-one-out maximum log-likelihood (LOO-MLL) criterion is proposed to prevent the singular solutions that the regular MLL criterion gives rise to, and it is proven that LOO-MLL prevents these. Relying on this guaranteed robustness, the model is extended by assigning learnable weights to the kernels. In addition, a modified expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to accelerate the optimization speed reliably. The performance of the proposed method and models are exhibited on two power systems datasets using different statistical tests and by comparison with Gaussian mixture models. Results show that the proposed models have promising performance, in addition to their singularity prevention guarantees.

A Constraint Enforcement Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Optimal Energy Storage Systems Dispatch

The optimal dispatch of energy storage systems (ESSs) presents formidable challenges due to the uncertainty introduced by fluctuations in dynamic prices, demand consumption, and renewable-based energy generation. By exploiting the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms can learn good-quality control models that adaptively respond to distribution networks' stochastic nature. However, current DRL algorithms lack the capabilities to enforce operational constraints strictly, often even providing unfeasible control actions. To address this issue, we propose a DRL framework that effectively handles continuous action spaces while strictly enforcing the environments and action space operational constraints during online operation. Firstly, the proposed framework trains an action-value function modeled using DNNs. Subsequently, this action-value function is formulated as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation enabling the consideration of the environment's operational constraints. Comprehensive numerical simulations show the superior performance of the proposed MIP-DRL framework, effectively enforcing all constraints while delivering high-quality dispatch decisions when compared with state-of-the-art DRL algorithms and the optimal solution obtained with a perfect forecast of the stochastic variables.

Targeted Analysis of High-Risk States Using an Oriented Variational Autoencoder

Variational autoencoder (VAE) neural networks can be trained to generate power system states that capture both marginal distribution and multivariate dependencies of historical data. The coordinates of the latent space codes of VAEs have been shown to correlate with conceptual features of the data, which can be leveraged to synthesize targeted data with desired features. However, the locations of the VAEs' latent space codes that correspond to specific properties are not constrained. Additionally, the generation of data with specific characteristics may require data with corresponding hard-to-get labels fed into the generative model for training. In this paper, to make data generation more controllable and efficient, an oriented variation autoencoder (OVAE) is proposed to constrain the link between latent space code and generated data in the form of a Spearman correlation, which provides increased control over the data synthesis process. On this basis, an importance sampling process is used to sample data in the latent space. Two cases are considered for testing the performance of the OVAE model: the data set is fully labeled with approximate information and the data set is incompletely labeled but with more accurate information. The experimental results show that, in both cases, the OVAE model correlates latent space codes with the generated data, and the efficiency of generating targeted samples is significantly improved.

Generating Contextual Load Profiles Using a Conditional Variational Autoencoder

Generating power system states that have similar distribution and dependency to the historical ones is essential for the tasks of system planning and security assessment, especially when the historical data is insufficient. In this paper, we described a generative model for load profiles of industrial and commercial customers, based on the conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) neural network architecture, which is challenging due to the highly variable nature of such profiles. Generated contextual load profiles were conditioned on the month of the year and typical power exchange with the grid. Moreover, the quality of generations was both visually and statistically evaluated. The experimental results demonstrate our proposed CVAE model can capture temporal features of historical load profiles and generate `realistic' data with satisfying univariate distributions and multivariate dependencies.

Performance Comparison of Deep RL Algorithms for Energy Systems Optimal Scheduling

Taking advantage of their data-driven and model-free features, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have the potential to deal with the increasing level of uncertainty due to the introduction of renewable-based generation. To deal simultaneously with the energy systems' operational cost and technical constraints (e.g, generation-demand power balance) DRL algorithms must consider a trade-off when designing the reward function. This trade-off introduces extra hyperparameters that impact the DRL algorithms' performance and capability of providing feasible solutions. In this paper, a performance comparison of different DRL algorithms, including DDPG, TD3, SAC, and PPO, are presented. We aim to provide a fair comparison of these DRL algorithms for energy systems optimal scheduling problems. Results show DRL algorithms' capability of providing in real-time good-quality solutions, even in unseen operational scenarios, when compared with a mathematical programming model of the energy system optimal scheduling problem. Nevertheless, in the case of large peak consumption, these algorithms failed to provide feasible solutions, which can impede their practical implementation.

Generating Multivariate Load States Using a Conditional Variational Autoencoder

For planning of power systems and for the calibration of operational tools, it is essential to analyse system performance in a large range of representative scenarios. When the available historical data is limited, generative models are a promising solution, but modelling high-dimensional dependencies is challenging. In this paper, a multivariate load state generating model on the basis of a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) neural network is proposed. Going beyond common CVAE implementations, the model includes stochastic variation of output samples under given latent vectors and co-optimizes the parameters for this output variability. It is shown that this improves statistical properties of the generated data. The quality of generated multivariate loads is evaluated using univariate and multivariate performance metrics. A generation adequacy case study on the European network is used to illustrate model's ability to generate realistic tail distributions. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed generator outperforms other data generating mechanisms.