Hierarchical GNNs for power flow: letting physics shape the hierarchy

Abstract

Hierarchical latent communication improves the generalization of a power-flow model, shared across three grids, to new operating scenarios. The module exchanges information through two reduced graphs inside the corrective network of GENCO, replacing two of its local correction steps. We compare Kron-derived transports, a same-anchor Quotient construction and the flat GENCO Base architecture, all trained under one protocol of our own with about a hundred times fewer optimizer updates per grid than GENCO's reference training: 200 epochs on three grid topologies, fewer than 1,900 training scenarios per grid and three initialization seeds per model. Evaluation uses 200 newly generated, preselected scenarios per grid. On the training topologies, Kron reaches a macro family-balanced voltage error of $0.851\pm0.110$, 51.3% below a per-bus mean fitted on training solutions (1.747). Kron is below this reference on 98.5% of the 600 fresh scenarios, and both hierarchical models outperform it on every training topology in all three seeds. The flat baseline reaches $5.660\pm0.899$ and does not outperform the reference on any training topology, so Kron's 85.0% reduction relative to it compares architectures within our training regime. Kron is also 31.0% below Quotient ($1.235\pm0.225$). These results demonstrate generalization across operating scenarios within the studied topologies, with one set of learned parameters shared across grids. On two topologies unseen in training, the current models do not yet outperform the fitted reference in calibrated transfer; extrapolation to new topologies is the next development objective.