Improving spatial allocation for energy system coupling with graph neural networks

In energy system analysis, coupling models with mismatched spatial resolutions is a significant challenge. A common solution is assigning weights to high-resolution geographic units for aggregation, but traditional models are limited by using only a single geospatial attribute. This paper presents an innovative method employing a self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network to address this issue. This method models high-resolution geographic units as graph nodes, integrating various geographical features to generate physically meaningful weights for each grid point. These weights enhance the conventional Voronoi-based allocation method, allowing it to go beyond simply geographic proximity by incorporating essential geographic information. In addition, the self-supervised learning paradigm overcomes the lack of accurate ground-truth data. Experimental results demonstrate that applying weights generated by this method to cluster-based Voronoi Diagrams significantly enhances scalability, accuracy, and physical plausibility, while increasing precision compared to traditional methods. Code is available at https://github.com/KIT-IAI/AllocateGNN