Monthly Power Outage Maintenance Scheduling for Power Grids Based on Interpretable Reinforcement Learning

This paper proposes an interpretable optimization method for power grid outage scheduling based on reinforcement learning. An outage scheduling optimization model is proposed, considering the convergence of power flow calculation, voltage violations, and operational economic behavior as objectives, while considering constraints such as simultaneous outage constraints, mutually exclusive constraints, and maintenance windows. Key features of the outage schedule are selected based on Shapley values to construct a Markov optimization model for outage scheduling. A deep reinforcement learning agent is established to optimize the outage schedule. The proposed method is applied to the IEEE-39 and IEEE-118 bus system for validation. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing algorithms in terms of voltage violation, total power losses, and computational time. The proposed method eliminates all voltage violations and reduces active power losses up to 5.7% and computation time by 6.8 h compared to conventional heuristic algorithms.