PhD position Graph-based Machine Learning for Power System State Estimation

TU Delft is a top tier university and is exceedingly active in the field of Artificial intelligence and the TU Delft's campus has strong expertise in energy systems. Energy systems are the backbone of our modern society, but are becoming increasingly complex and challenging to operate as renewable energy, heating and transport sectors are integrated into the system. It’s crucially important that energy systems are sustainable, reliable and effective, now and in the future.

As part of your 4-year PhD project, you will develop novel graph-based machine learning algorithms for state estimation of energy systems. The scientific challenge is to design a real-time state estimator for the distribution system that accounts for future needs. The future system requires tasks to manage flexibility provisions from distribution systems, effective anomaly detection, congestion management, and fraud detection. State estimation is an important task where the operator considers very little noisy measurement data to infer the full system state. However, often, the accuracy is used to infer the full state while the true state is seldom known and can only be reproduced in computer simulations. Therefore, you will explore a novel approach investigating graph neural networks and structural information and learn the state-estimator semi-supervised enforcing known constraints.

The AI for Energy Grids Lab is a partnership between the Distribution System Operator Alliander, TU Delft, Radboud University, University of Twente and HAN University of Applied Sciences. In the AI for Energy Grids Lab , we combine ground-breaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods with the reliable theory of the physical energy system. The area of data-driven scientific computing promises to combine statistics, time-frequency analysis, low-dimensional model reductions, and other techniques to extract information from data. With AI, we make such information useful for the management and planning of complex energy systems.

You will be hired as a PhD researcher at TU Delft. Your academic supervisors are Dr. Jochen Cremer (TU Delft, daily supervisor) and Prof. Peter Palensky (TU Delft). Recognising the transformational power of AI, TU Delft has launched a large cross-faculty AI initiative where this lab will expand the Delft AI Energy Lab. Within the AI for Energy Grids Lab, you will be part of a team of five newly hired PhD researchers. Together with this team, you will spend two days a week at Alliander (in Arnhem), supported by around 10 Scientific staff, data scientists and power system experts. At the same time at TU Delft, you will be a member of the Intelligent Electrical Power Grids research group.