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General

A set of benchmark environments to solve the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem with reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. It is also easily possible to create custom OPF environments. All environments use the gymnasium API. The modelling of the power systems and the calculation of power flows happens with pandapower. The benchmark power grids and time-series data of loads and generators are taken from SimBench.

Documentation can be found on https://opf-gym.readthedocs.io/en/latest/.

Warning: The whole repository is work-in-progress. Feel free to use the environments as benchmarks for your research. However, the environments can be expected to change slightly in the next months. The release of version 1.0 is planned for winter 2024. Afterward, the benchmarks will be kept as stable as possible.

If you want to use the benchmark environments or the general framework to build own environments, please cite the following publication, where the framework is first mentioned (in an early stage): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyai.2024.100410

Installation

Run pip install opfgym within some kind of virtual env. For contributing, clone the repository and run pip install -e .. Tested for python 3.10.

Environments

Currently, five OPF benchmark environments are available.

• EcoDispatch: Economic dispatch
• VoltageControl: Voltage Control with reactive power
• MaxRenewable: Maximize renewable feed-in
• QMarket: Reactive power market
• LoadShedding: Load shedding problem

Additionally, some example environments for more advanced features can be found in opfgym/examples.

Working With the Framework

All environments use the gymnasium API:

• Use env.reset() to start a new episode (see gymnasium docs)
• Use env.step(action) to apply an action to the environment (see gymnasium docs)
• Use env.render() to render the underlying power grid. For documentation of the usable keyword arguments, refer to the pandapower documentation:

On top, some additional OPF-specfic features are implemented:

• Use env.run_optimal_power_flow to run an OPF on the current state. Returns True if successful, False otherwise.
• Use env.get_optimal_objective() to return the optimal value of the objective function. Warning: Run env.run_optimal_power_flow() beforehand!
• Use sum(env.calculate_objective()) to compute the value of the objective function in the current state. (Remove the sum() to get a vector representation)
• Use env.get_current_actions() to get the currently applied actions (e.g. generator setpoints). Warning: The actions are always scaled to range [0, 1] and not directly interpretable as power setpoints! 0 represents the minimum possible setpoint, while 1 represents the maximum setpoint.
• env.is_state_valid() to check if the current power grid state contains any constraint violations.
• env.is_optimal_state_valid() to check if the power grid state contains any constraint violations after running the OPF.
• Work-in-progress (TODO: env.get_current_setpoints(), error_metrics etc.)

Contribution

Any kind of contribution is welcome! Feel free to create issues or merge requests. Also, additional benchmark environment are highly appreciated. For example, the examples environments could be refined to difficult but solvable RL-OPF benchmarks. Here, it would be especially helpful to incorporate an OPF solver that is more capable than the very limited pandapower OPF. For example, it should be able to deal with multi-stage problems, discrete actuators like switches, and stochastic problems, which the pandapower OPF can't. For questions, feedback, collaboration, etc., contact thomas.wolgast@uni-oldenburg.de.