Hot-Starting the Ac Power Flow with Convolutional Neural Networks

Obtaining good initial conditions to solve the Newton-Raphson (NR) based ac power flow (ACPF) problem can be a very difficult task. In this paper, we propose a framework to obtain the initial bus voltage magnitude and phase values that decrease the solution iterations and time for the NR based ACPF model, using the dc power flow (DCPF) results and one dimensional convolutional neural networks (1D CNNs). We generate the dataset used to train the 1D CNNs by sampling from a distribution of load demands, and by computing the DCPF and ACPF results for each sample. Experiments on the IEEE 118-bus and \textsc{Pegase} 2869-bus study systems show that we can achieve 33.56\% and 30.06\% reduction in solution time, and 66.47% and 49.52% reduction in solution iterations per case, respectively. We include the 1D CNN architectures and the hyperparameters used, which can be expanded on by the future studies on this topic.