Severity-Aware Minimum Security Sets for Accelerated Preventive SCOPF Using Machine Learning

This paper proposes a severity-aware machine learning framework for reducing the computational burden of preventive AC security-constrained optimal power flow (PSCOPF). The central idea is to identify a compact minimum security set (MSS) containing only the non-dominated contingencies and associated post-contingency constraints that materially influence the preventive operating point while satisfying a prescribed severity tolerance. An offline procedure combines AC security assessment, severity-based ranking, non-dominated screening, and iterative reduced PSCOPF. After each reduced PSCOPF solution, exhaustive security assessment over all credible contingencies identifies additional contingency–constraint pairs whose residual severity exceeds the specified threshold. Severity is characterized using the normalized number, accumulated magnitude, maximum magnitude, and average magnitude of post-contingency violations. The resulting operating-point-dependent MSSs are used as labels for a supervised multi-label learning model that predicts the security elements required to construct the reduced PSCOPF directly from the pre-contingency state. The proposed framework therefore focuses the optimization on the contingencies and constraints that affect preventive control decisions, reducing problem size and computation time while explicitly controlling residual post-contingency severity. Results on the IEEE 60-bus and 118-bus systems, the latter having an approximately seven-times-larger PSCOPF formulation, demonstrate substantial computational reductions with limited impact on the preventive operating solution.