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Main Authors: Cho, Young-ho, Nagarajan, Harsha, Deka, Deepjyoti, Zhu, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06187
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author Cho, Young-ho
Nagarajan, Harsha
Deka, Deepjyoti
Zhu, Hao
author_facet Cho, Young-ho
Nagarajan, Harsha
Deka, Deepjyoti
Zhu, Hao
contents The adversarial worst-case load shedding (AWLS) problem is pivotal for identifying critical contingencies under line outages. It is naturally cast as a bilevel program: the upper level simulates an attacker determining worst-case line failures, and the lower level corresponds to the defender's generator redispatch operations. Conventional techniques using optimality conditions render the bilevel, mixed-integer formulation computationally prohibitive due to the combinatorial number of topologies and the nonconvexity of AC power flow constraints. To address these challenges, we develop a novel single-level optimal value-function (OVF) reformulation and further leverage a data-driven neural network (NN) surrogate of the follower's optimal value. To ensure physical realizability, we embed the trained surrogate in a physics-constrained NN (PCNN) formulation that couples the OVF inequality with (relaxed) AC feasibility, yielding a mixed-integer convex model amenable to off-the-shelf solvers. To achieve scalability, we learn a sparse, area-partitioned NN via spectral clustering; the resulting block-sparse architecture scales essentially linearly with system size while preserving accuracy. Notably, our approach produces near-optimal worst-case failures and generalizes across loading conditions and unseen topologies, enabling rapid online recomputation. Numerical experiments on the IEEE 14- and 118-bus systems demonstrate the method's scalability and solution quality for large-scale contingency analysis, with an average optimality gap of 5.8% compared to conventional methods, while maintaining computation times under one minute.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sparse Neural Approximations for Bilevel Adversarial Problems in Power Grids
Cho, Young-ho
Nagarajan, Harsha
Deka, Deepjyoti
Zhu, Hao
Systems and Control
The adversarial worst-case load shedding (AWLS) problem is pivotal for identifying critical contingencies under line outages. It is naturally cast as a bilevel program: the upper level simulates an attacker determining worst-case line failures, and the lower level corresponds to the defender's generator redispatch operations. Conventional techniques using optimality conditions render the bilevel, mixed-integer formulation computationally prohibitive due to the combinatorial number of topologies and the nonconvexity of AC power flow constraints. To address these challenges, we develop a novel single-level optimal value-function (OVF) reformulation and further leverage a data-driven neural network (NN) surrogate of the follower's optimal value. To ensure physical realizability, we embed the trained surrogate in a physics-constrained NN (PCNN) formulation that couples the OVF inequality with (relaxed) AC feasibility, yielding a mixed-integer convex model amenable to off-the-shelf solvers. To achieve scalability, we learn a sparse, area-partitioned NN via spectral clustering; the resulting block-sparse architecture scales essentially linearly with system size while preserving accuracy. Notably, our approach produces near-optimal worst-case failures and generalizes across loading conditions and unseen topologies, enabling rapid online recomputation. Numerical experiments on the IEEE 14- and 118-bus systems demonstrate the method's scalability and solution quality for large-scale contingency analysis, with an average optimality gap of 5.8% compared to conventional methods, while maintaining computation times under one minute.
title Sparse Neural Approximations for Bilevel Adversarial Problems in Power Grids
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06187