Reinforcement learning (RL) can transform power grid operations by providing adaptive and scalable controllers essential for grid decarbonization. However, existing methods struggle with the complex dynamics, aleatoric uncertainty, long-horizon goals, and hard physical constraints that occur in real-world systems. This paper presents RL2Grid, a benchmark designed in collaboration with power system operators to accelerate progress in grid control and foster RL maturity. Built on a power simulation framework developed by RTE France, RL2Grid standardizes tasks, state and action spaces, and reward structures within a unified interface for a systematic evaluation and comparison of RL approaches. Moreover, we integrate real control heuristics and safety constraints informed by the operators' expertise to ensure RL2Grid aligns with grid operation requirements. We benchmark popular RL baselines on the grid control tasks represented within RL2Grid, establishing reference performance metrics. Our results and discussion highlight the challenges that power grids pose for RL methods, emphasizing the need for novel algorithms capable of handling real-world physical systems.

Organising an AI challenge does not end with the final event. The long-lasting impact also needs to be organised. This chapter covers the various activities after the challenge is formally finished. The target audience of different post-challenge activities is identified. The various outputs of the challenge are listed with the means to collect them. The main part of the chapter is a template for a typical post-challenge paper, including possible graphs as well as advice on how to turn the challenge into a long-lasting benchmark.

The operation of electricity grids has become increasingly complex due to the current upheaval and the increase in renewable energy production. As a consequence, active grid management is reaching its limits with conventional approaches. In the context of the Learning to Run a Power Network challenge, it has been shown that Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an efficient and reliable approach with considerable potential for automatic grid operation. In this article, we analyse the submitted agent from Binbinchen and provide novel strategies to improve the agent, both for the RL and the rule-based approach. The main improvement is a N-1 strategy, where we consider topology actions that keep the grid stable, even if one line is disconnected. More, we also propose a topology reversion to the original grid, which proved to be beneficial. The improvements are tested against reference approaches on the challenge test sets and are able to increase the performance of the rule-based agent by 27%. In direct comparison between rule-based and RL agent we find similar performance. However, the RL agent has a clear computational advantage. We also analyse the behaviour in an exemplary case in more detail to provide additional insights. Here, we observe that through the N-1 strategy, the actions of the agents become more diversified.

We propose a new adversarial training approach for injecting robustness when designing controllers for upcoming cyber-physical power systems. Previous approaches relying deeply on simulations are not able to cope with the rising complexity and are too costly when used online in terms of computation budget. In comparison, our method proves to be computationally efficient online while displaying useful robustness properties. To do so we model an adversarial framework, propose the implementation of a fixed opponent policy and test it on a L2RPN (Learning to Run a Power Network) environment. That environment is a synthetic but realistic modeling of a cyber-physical system accounting for one third of the IEEE 118 grid. Using adversarial testing, we analyze the results of submitted trained agents from the robustness track of the L2RPN competition. We then further assess the performance of those agents in regards to the continuous N-1 problem through tailored evaluation metrics. We discover that some agents trained in an adversarial way demonstrate interesting preventive behaviors in that regard, which we discuss.

Power systems are becoming more complex to operate in the digital age. As a result, real-time decision-making is getting more challenging as the human operator has to deal with more information, more uncertainty, more applications and more coordination. While supervision has been primarily used to help them make decisions over the last decades, it cannot reasonably scale up anymore. There is a great need for rethinking the human-machine interface under more unified and interactive frameworks. Taking advantage of the latest developments in Human-machine Interactions and Artificial intelligence, we share the vision of a new assistant framework relying on an hypervision interface and greater bidirectional interactions. We review the known principles of decision-making that drives the assistant design and supporting assistance functions we present. We finally share some guidelines to make progress towards the development of such an assistant.

We propose a novel neural network embedding approach to model power transmission grids, in which high voltage lines are disconnected and reconnected with one-another from time to time, either accidentally or willfully. We call our architecture LEAP net, for Latent Encoding of Atypical Perturbation. Our method implements a form of transfer learning, permitting to train on a few source domains, then generalize to new target domains, without learning on any example of that domain. We evaluate the viability of this technique to rapidly assess curative actions that human operators take in emergency situations, using real historical data, from the French high voltage power grid.Figure 1: Electricity is transported from production nodes (top) to consumption nodes (bottom), through lines (green and red edges) connected at substations (black circles), forming a transmission grid of a given topology τ . Injections x ( x 1, x 2, x 3, x 4) (production or consumption) add up to zero.

We address the problem of maintaining high voltage power transmission networks in security at all time. This requires that power flowing through all lines remain below a certain nominal thermal limit above which lines might melt, break or cause other damages. Current practices include enforcing the deterministic "N-1" reliability criterion, namely anticipating exceeding of thermal limit for any eventual single line disconnection (whatever its cause may be) by running a slow, but accurate, physical grid simulator. New conceptual frameworks are calling for a probabilistic risk based security criterion and are in need of new methods to assess the risk. To tackle this difficult assessment, we address in this paper the problem of rapidly ranking higher order contingencies including all pairs of line disconnections, to better prioritize simulations. We present a novel method based on neural networks, which ranks "N-1" and "N-2" contingencies in decreasing order of presumed severity. We demonstrate on a classical benchmark problem that the residual risk of contingencies decreases dramatically compared to considering solely all "N-1" cases, at no additional computational cost. We evaluate that our method scales up to power grids of the size of the French high voltage power grid (over 1000 power lines).

We address the problem of maintaining high voltage power transmission networks in security at all time, namely anticipating exceeding of thermal limit for eventual single line disconnection (whatever its cause may be) by running slow, but accurate, physical grid simulators. New conceptual frameworks are calling for a probabilistic risk-based security criterion. However, these approaches suffer from high requirements in terms of tractability. Here, we propose a new method to assess the risk. This method uses both machine learning techniques (artificial neural networks) and more standard simulators based on physical laws. More specifically we train neural networks to estimate the overall dangerousness of a grid state. A classical benchmark problem (manpower 118 buses test case) is used to show the strengths of the proposed method.

We propose a new method to efficiently compute load-flows (the steady-state of the power-grid for given productions, consumptions and grid topology), substituting conventional simulators based on differential equation solvers. We use a deep feed-forward neural network trained with load-flows precomputed by simulation. Our architecture permits to train a network on so-called "n-1" problems, in which load flows are evaluated for every possible line disconnection, then generalize to "n-2" problems without retraining (a clear advantage because of the combinatorial nature of the problem). To that end, we developed a technique bearing similarity with "dropout", which we named "guided dropout".

The segmentation of large scale power grids into zones allows a better understanding of its structure, as the control room operators will naturally but manually do for any study. In this paper we provide a new automatic hierarchical method based on the community detection algorithm \textit{Infomap}. Our main contribution is to offer as input a new representation of the power grid, called the security analysis, that represents power flow affinities beyond the connectivity of the grid, a point that will become even more relevant for tomorrow's cyber-physical system. Indeed we already discover few relevant and important clusters that are not connected in the actual grid topology. To better describe and investigate the method, we apply it here on the well-studied IEEE-RTS-96 and IEEE-118. We further applied our method on the large-scale French Power Grid which showed promising results given its puzzling resemblance with the historical RTE regional segmentation.