Intelligent Domain Adaptation for Power System Transient Stability Assessment Under Varying Operating Scenarios

While deep learning–based transient stability assessment (TSA) approaches have exhibited great potential in power system stability monitoring, they are prone to undergo performance degradation in practical contexts with frequent variations of operating conditions. To address this issue, this work develops an adaptive TSA framework via domain adaptation-enabled deep transfer learning. First, for the sake of capturing the primary transient stability characteristics, a robust metric, i.e., heterogeneous hybrid distribution metric (HHDM), is designed through mathematical means to effectively handle multiscale Gaussian and long-tail distributions of transient responsive data and to precisely quantify the intrinsic distributional discrepancies between the source and target domains (corresponding to different operating scenarios). With the help of the HHDM, a Bayesian theory-based dual-distribution domain adaptation method is constructed, aligning not only marginal probability distributions between domains but also the distributions of subdomain categories. Such alignments enable fine-grained transient stability feature transfer, helping significantly improve the adaptability of a well-trained TSA model to target domains. Furthermore, a multilayer sparse regularization algorithm is introduced to mitigate feature volatility caused by variations in operating scenarios, thereby enhancing the model’s generalization in the presence of unforeseen scenarios. Numerical tests on three test systems illustrate that, compared with conventional methods, the proposed framework improves online TSA accuracy by 0.5%–5% in a cost-effective manner, with the learning cost for TSA model update largely reduced.