This paper presents a novel, unified approach for generating high-quality datasets for training machine-learned models for real-time security assessment in power systems. Synthetic data generation methods that extrapolate beyond historical data can be inefficient in generating feasible and rare operating conditions (OCs). The proposed approach balances the trade-off between historically relevant OCs and rare but feasible OCs. Unlike conventional methods that rely on historical records or generic sampling, our approach results in datasets that generalise well beyond similar distributions. The proposed approach is validated through experiments on the IEEE 118-bus system, where a decision tree model trained on data generated using our approach achieved 97% accuracy in predicting the security label of rare OCs, outperforming baseline approaches by 41% and 20%. This work is crucial for deploying reliable machine-learned models for real-time security assessment in power systems undergoing decarbonisation and integrating renewable energy sources.

Machine learning (ML) for real-time security assessment requires a diverse training database to be accurate for scenarios beyond historical records. Generating diverse operating conditions is highly relevant for the uncertain future of emerging power systems that are completely different to historical power systems. In response, for the first time, this work proposes a novel split-based sequential sampling approach based on optimisation that generates more diverse operation scenarios for training ML models than state-of-the-art approaches. This work also proposes a volume-based coverage metric, the convex hull volume (CHV), to quantify the quality of samplers based on the coverage of generated data. This metric accounts for the distribution of samples across multidimensional space to measure coverage within the physical network limits. Studies on IEEE test cases with 6, 68 and 118 buses demonstrate the efficiency of the approach. Samples generated using the proposed split-based sampling cover 37.5% more volume than random sampling in the IEEE 68-bus system. The proposed CHV metric can assess the quality of generated samples (standard deviation of 0.74) better than a distance-based coverage metric which outputs the same value (standard deviation of <0.001) for very different data distributions in the IEEE 68-bus system. As we demonstrate, the proposed split-based sampling is relevant as a pre-step for training ML models for critical tasks such as security assessment.

The classical formulation of the transmission switching problem as a mixed-integer problem is intractable for large systems in real-time control settings. Several heuristics have been proposed in the past to speed up the computation time, which only limits the number of switchable lines. In this paper, a real-time switching heuristic based on neural networks that provides almost instantaneous switching actions, are presented. The findings are shown on case studies of the IEEE 118-bus test system, and the results show that the proposed heuristic is robust to out of distribution data. Additionally, the proposed heuristic has significant computational savings while all other performance metrics like accuracy are similar to state-of-the-art machine learning methods proposed for transmission switching.