Encoding Time Series as Images: A Robust and Transferable Framework for Power System DIM Identification Combining Rules and VGGNet

Digital simulation is very important for the safe and economic operation of power systems. Power system dominant instability mode (DIM) identification is an intractable problem in large-scale transient simulation analysis, because transient instability and short-term voltage instability are often intertwined. Deep learning is a promising way to achieve accurate DIM identification. By encoding time series as images, this paper proposes a robust and transferable DIM identification framework combining curve filtering rules and a dual-channel VGGNet (DCVGG) image recognition network. The curve filtering rules can effectively reduce the redundancy of massive time-domain features, the model parameters, and training time. A skillfully designed method is proposed to encode time series as images and improve the feature extraction capability of convolutional neural networks. The proposed DCVGG network is capable of processing rotor angle and voltage images simultaneously and has the potential to become a pre-trained model, making transfer learning between different power systems possible. Case studies conducted on 8-machine 36-bus system and Northeast China Power Grid demonstrate the proposed framework has better performance, scalability, robustness, and transferable ability than contrastive machine learning methods.