Predicting Braess's paradox of power grids using graph neural networks

Abstract

As an increasing number of renewable energy generators are integrated into the electrical grid, the necessity to add new transmission lines to facilitate power transfer and ensure grid stability becomes paramount. However, the addition of new transmission lines to the existing grid topology can lead to the emergence of Braess's paradox or even trigger grid failures. Hence, predicting where to add transmission lines to guarantee stable grid operation is of utmost importance. In this context, we employ deep learning to address this challenge and propose a graph neural network-based method for predicting Braess's paradox in electrical grids, framing the problem of adding new transmission lines causing Braess's paradox as a graph classification task. Taking into consideration the topological and electrical attributes of the grid, we select node features such as degree, closeness centrality, and power values. This approach assists the model in better understanding the relationships between nodes, enhancing the model's representational capabilities. Furthermore, we apply layered adaptive weighting to the output of the graph isomorphism network to emphasize the significance of hierarchical information that has a greater impact on the output, thus improving the model’s generalization across electrical grids of varying scales. Experimental results on the IEEE 39, IEEE 57, and IEEE 118 standard test systems demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, achieving prediction accuracies of 93.8%, 88.8%, and 88.1%, respectively. Model visualization and ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of this approach.