Symmetry-Aware Interpretable Anomaly Alarm Optimization Method for Power Monitoring Systems Based on Hierarchical Attention Deep Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid advancement of smart grids driven by renewable energy integration and the extensive deployment of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and phasor measurement units (PMUs), addressing the escalating alarm flooding via intelligent analysis of large-scale alarm data is pivotal to safeguarding the safe and stable operation of power grids. To tackle these challenges, this study introduces a pioneering alarm optimization framework based on symmetry-driven crowdsourced active learning and interpretable deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Firstly, an anomaly alarm annotation method integrating differentiated crowdsourcing and active learning is proposed to mitigate the inherent asymmetry in data distribution. Secondly, a symmetrically structured DRL-based hierarchical attention deep Q-network is designed with a dual-path encoder to balance the processing of multi-scale alarm features. Finally, a SHAP-driven interpretability framework is established, providing global and local attribution to enhance decision transparency. Experimental results on a real-world power alarm dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a Fleiss’ Kappa of 0.82 in annotation consistency and an F1-Score of 0.95 in detection performance, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, the false positive rate is reduced to 0.04, verifying the framework’s effectiveness in suppressing alarm flooding while maintaining high recall.