A Lightweight Method for Power Quality Disturbance Recognition Based on Optimized VMD and CNN–Transformer

Aiming at the issues of low recognition accuracy and high model computational complexity for power quality disturbances (PQDs) in strong-noise environments, this paper proposes a novel lightweight PQD-recognition method that integrates a hybrid architecture of variational mode decomposition (VMD), convolutional neural network (CNN), and transformer. Firstly, a hybrid optimization algorithm named the monkey–genetic hybrid optimization algorithm (MGHOA) is proposed to optimize VMD parameters for denoising disturbance signals, thereby enhancing recognition accuracy in noisy environments. Secondly, to fully extract disturbance signal features and reduce the computational complexity of the model, a lightweight CNN–transformer model is designed. Depthwise separable convolution (DSC) is employed to extract local features and the multi-head attention mechanism of transformer is utilized to mine the long-distance dependence and global features, thereby enhancing the feature representation. Thirdly, a multitask joint-learning method is proposed to collaboratively optimize classification accuracy and temporal localization tasks, enhancing the discrimination of similar disturbances. Additionally, a dual-pooling global feature fusion strategy is designed to further enhance the model’s ability to discriminate complex disturbances. Comparative experiments on 16 typical PQD types demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent performance in recognition accuracy, model robustness, and computational efficiency. The integration of the MGHOA–VMD module improves recognition accuracy by 1.08%, while the multitask joint-learning method contributes an additional 0.55% improvement. When achieving recognition accuracy comparable to complex models, the training time of the proposed method is 36.51% of that required by DeepCNN and merely 5.90% of that required by bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM), with a 31.22% reduction in parameter scale. This work provides a novel solution for intelligent power quality disturbance recognition.