TY - GEN
T1 - PowerGrow
T2 - 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.1, KDD 2026
AU - He, Xinyu
AU - Xiao, Chenhan
AU - Li, Haoran
AU - Qiu, Ruizhong
AU - Xu, Zhe
AU - Weng, Yang
AU - He, Jingrui
AU - Tong, Hanghang
N1 - This work is supported by NSF (2324770, 2048288) and AFOSR (FA9550-22-1-0294). The content of the information in this document does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation here on.
PY - 2026/4/20
Y1 - 2026/4/20
N2 - Modern power systems are becoming increasingly dynamic, with changing topologies and time-varying loads driven by renewable energy variability, electric vehicle adoption, and active grid reconfiguration. Despite these changes, publicly available test cases remain scarce, due to security concerns and the significant effort required to anonymize real systems. Such limitations call for generative tools that can jointly synthesize grid structure and nodal dynamics. However, modeling the joint distribution of network topology, branch attributes, bus properties, and dynamic load profiles remains a major challenge, while preserving physical feasibility and avoiding prohibitive computational costs. We present PowerGrow, a co-generative framework that significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining operational validity. The core idea is dependence decomposition: the complex joint distribution is factorized into a chain of conditional distributions over feasible grid topologies, time-series bus loads, and other system attributes, leveraging their mutual dependencies. By constraining the generation process at each stage, we implement a hierarchical graph beta-diffusion process for structural synthesis, paired with a temporal autoencoder that embeds time-series data into a compact latent space, improving both training stability and sample fidelity. Experiments across benchmark settings show that PowerGrow not only outperforms prior diffusion models in fidelity and diversity but also achieves a 98.9% power flow convergence rate and improved N-1 contingency resilience. This demonstrates its ability to generate operationally valid and realistic power grid scenarios.
AB - Modern power systems are becoming increasingly dynamic, with changing topologies and time-varying loads driven by renewable energy variability, electric vehicle adoption, and active grid reconfiguration. Despite these changes, publicly available test cases remain scarce, due to security concerns and the significant effort required to anonymize real systems. Such limitations call for generative tools that can jointly synthesize grid structure and nodal dynamics. However, modeling the joint distribution of network topology, branch attributes, bus properties, and dynamic load profiles remains a major challenge, while preserving physical feasibility and avoiding prohibitive computational costs. We present PowerGrow, a co-generative framework that significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining operational validity. The core idea is dependence decomposition: the complex joint distribution is factorized into a chain of conditional distributions over feasible grid topologies, time-series bus loads, and other system attributes, leveraging their mutual dependencies. By constraining the generation process at each stage, we implement a hierarchical graph beta-diffusion process for structural synthesis, paired with a temporal autoencoder that embeds time-series data into a compact latent space, improving both training stability and sample fidelity. Experiments across benchmark settings show that PowerGrow not only outperforms prior diffusion models in fidelity and diversity but also achieves a 98.9% power flow convergence rate and improved N-1 contingency resilience. This demonstrates its ability to generate operationally valid and realistic power grid scenarios.
KW - diffusion model
KW - graph generation
KW - power grid synthesis
KW - time series data generation
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105038083980
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105038083980#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3770854.3780235
DO - 10.1145/3770854.3780235
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105038083980
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
SP - 428
EP - 439
BT - KDD 2026 - Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.1
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 9 August 2026 through 13 August 2026
ER -