Finite sample safety check for ai control of energy devices
Finite-Sample Probabilistic Safety Certification for AI-Based Grid-Edge Coordination
Artificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
Summary
Power networks use flexible devices at the edges of the grid to better handle electricity demand, but AI systems controlling these devices need to be proven safe before use. The authors created a method that tests AI controllers with a limited number of example scenarios to give a clear safety guarantee based on exact probability calculations. They also test the AI’s weaknesses by simulating challenging conditions to make sure the safety checks remain valid. Their tests show this approach works even for very large AI systems controlling thousands of devices.
What this means in practice
- •For power system operators: Assess AI controllers for flexible grid devices with a statistical safety guarantee before deployment in live power networks.
- •For energy management platform developers: Integrate safety certification into AI-based coordination tools managing thousands of grid-edge devices to ensure reliable operation.
Authors
Yihong Zhou, Hanbin Yang, Thomas Morstyn
Abstract
Coordinating large population of flexible grid-edge devices can alleviate the need for time-consuming and capital-intensive network upgrades, and AI-based control methods such as multi-agent reinforcement learning or imitation learning are promising in their real-time decision scalability. However, system operators still need an independent and rigorous way to decide whether a given AI system is safe enough for deployment. This paper develops a finite-sample probabilistic safety certification framework for black-box AI decision models in closed-loop grid operation. The central idea is to reduce the complete input--AI--grid evaluator workflow to a binary unsafe outcome under an operator-defined safety specification, and then use exact binomial inference to certify the corresponding unsafe operation probability. Given a set of held-out calibration scenarios, the framework returns the tightest one-sided upper certificate and an accept/reject deployment criterion that controls the probability of false safety certification. Because the certification is for the calibration distribution that may deviate from the future operation, we further combine the nominal certificate with physically interpretable sample-space adversarial attacks, a concept widely used in AI to investigate the fragility of AI models. Case studies on grid-edge flexibility coordination with 1{,}000-agent AI models (independent parameters) verify the finite-sample safety guarantee and the value of integrating adversarial attacks into a rolling-window training-certification-deployment flow.