Transient Stability Assessment in Power Systems: A Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network Approach with Graph Simplification

Accurate and fast transient stability assessment (TSA) of power systems is crucial for safe operation. However, deep learning-based methods require long training and fail to simultaneously extract the spatiotemporal characteristics of the transient process in power systems, limiting their performance in prediction. This paper proposes a novel TSA method based on a spatiotemporal graph convolutional network with graph simplification. First, based on the topology and node information entropy of power grids, as well as the power flow of each node, the input characteristic matrix is compressed to accelerate evaluation. Then, a high-performance TSA model combining a graph convolutional network and a Gated Convolutional Network is constructed to extract the spatial features of the power grid and the temporal features of the transient process. This model establishes a mapping relationship between spatiotemporal features and their transient stability. Finally, the focal loss function has been improved to dynamically adjust the influence of samples with different levels of difficulty on model training, adaptively addressing the challenge of sample imbalance. This improvement reduces misclassification rates and enhances overall accuracy. Case studies on the IEEE 39-bus system demonstrate that the proposed method is rapid, reliable, and generalizable.