Noise-Resilient Quantum Machine Learning for Stability Assessment of Power Systems

Transient stability assessment (TSA) is a cornerstone for resilient operations of today’s interconnected power grids. This paper is a confluence of quantum computing, data science and machine learning to potentially address the power system TSA issue. We devise a quantum TSA (QTSA) method to enable efficient data-driven transient stability prediction for bulk power systems, which is the first attempt to tackle the TSA issue with quantum computing. Our contributions are three-fold: 1) A high expressibility, low-depth quantum circuit (HELD) is designed for accurate and noise-resilient TSA; 2) A quantum natural gradient descent algorithm is developed for efficient HELD training and 3) A systematical analysis on QTSA’s performance under various quantum factors is performed. QTSA underpins a foundation of quantum machine learning-enabled power grid stability analytics. It renders the intractable TSA straightforward and effortless in the Hilbert space, and therefore provides stability information for power system operations. Extensive experiments on quantum simulators and real quantum computers verify the accuracy, noise-resilience, scalability and universality of QTSA.