DeepOPF: Deep neural network for DC optimal power flow

We develop DeepOPF as a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based approach for solving direct current optimal power flow (DC-OPF) problems. DeepOPF is inspired by the observation that solving DC-OPF for a given power network is equivalent to characterizing a high-dimensional mapping between the load inputs and the dispatch and transmission decisions. We construct and train a DNN model to learn such mapping, then we apply it to obtain optimized operating decisions upon arbitrary load inputs. We adopt uniform sampling to address the over-fitting problem common in generic DNN approaches. We leverage on a useful structure in DC-OPF to significantly reduce the mapping dimension, subsequently cutting down the size of our DNN model and the amount of training data/time needed. We also design a post-processing procedure to ensure the feasibility of the obtained solution. Simulation results of IEEE test cases show that DeepOPF always generates feasible solutions with negligible optimality loss, while speeding up the computing time by two orders of magnitude as compared to conventional approaches implemented in a state-of-the-art solver.