PowerChain: Automating Distribution Grid Analysis with Agentic AI Workflows

Due to the rapid pace of electrification and decarbonization, distribution grid (DG) operation and planning are becoming more complex, necessitating advanced computational analyses to ensure grid reliability and resilience. State-of-the-art DG analyses rely on disparate workflows of complex models, functions, and data pipelines, which require expert knowledge and are challenging to automate. Many small-scale utilities and cooperatives lack a large R&D workforce and therefore cannot use advanced analysis at scale. To address this gap, we develop a novel agentic AI system, PowerChain, to solve unseen DG analysis tasks via automated agentic orchestration and large language models (LLMs) function-calling. Given a natural language query, PowerChain dynamically generates and executes an ordered sequence of domain-aware functions guided by the semantics of an expert-built power systems function pool and a select reference set of known, expert-generated workflow-query pairs. Our results show that PowerChain can produce expert-level workflows with both GPT-5 and open-source Qwen models on complex, unseen DG analysis tasks operating on real utility data.