IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 37, NO.
4, AUGUST 2022
Parameter Identification in Power Transmission
Systems Based on Graph Convolution Network
Zhiwei Wang, Min Xia , Member, IEEE, Min Lu, Lingling Pan, and Jun Liu
Abstract—Parameter Identification plays an important role in
electric power transmission systems. Existing approaches for pa-
rameter identification tasks typically have two limitations: (1) They
generally ignored development trend of historical data, and did
not mine characteristics of corresponding power grid branches. (2)
They did not consider the constraints of power grid topology, and
treated different branches independently. Therefore, they could not
characterize correlations between the center node and its neighbor-
hoods. To overcome these limitations, this work proposes a multi-
task graph convolutional neural network (MT-GCN) which utilizes
the graph convolutional network (GCN) and the fully convolutional
network (FCN) as building blocks for parameter identification.
Specially, GCN can extract the structure information to enhance
local feature extraction. FCN is a decoding module following GCN
module, and it is used to identify the parameters of each branch
according to its characteristics. Compared with previous methods,
the proposed method is significantly improved in accuracy. Besides,
this method is robust to measurement noise and errors, and can
cope with multiple conditions in real power transmission systems.
Index Terms—Graph convolutional network, parameter
identification, power transmission systems.
I. INTRODUCTION
ITH the rapid development of smart grid, the operation
W of power grid become very complicated, and the corre-
sponding regulations thereby become very strict [1], as a result,
higher requirements for model parameters accuracy are needed.
Due to the limitation of measurement methods, there are errors
in measured parameters of power transmission systems [2]. Pa-
rameter identification is also affected by environmental factors
such as geology, climate and uneven delivery of earth resistivity
along the line [3], even the change of operation mode affects the
operation parameters of power grid [4].
Manuscript received May 30, 2021; revised August 11, 2021; accepted Octo-
ber 26, 2021. Date of publication November 2, 2021; date of current version July
25, 2022. This work was supported by the Science and Technology Project of
SGCC, named Data and Model driven Parameter Identification for the branches
in Power Grid. Paper no. TPWRD-00791-2021. (Corresponding author: Min
Xia.)
Zhiwei Wang and Min Xia are with the Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big
Data Analysis Technology, CICAEET, Nanjing University of Information Sci-
ence and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China (e-mail: 532047847@qq.com;
xiamin@nuist.edu.cn).
Min Lu is with the State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Company, Ltd.,
Hangzhou 310007, China (e-mail: lu_min@zj.sgcc.com.cn).
Lingling Pan and Jun Liu are with the China Electric Power Research Institute
Company, Ltd., Nanjing 210003, China (e-mail: panlingling@epri.sgcc.com.cn;
liu-jun2@epri.sgcc.com.cn).
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https://doi.org/10.1109/TPWRD.2021.3124528.
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3155
At present, methods for obtaining transmission line param-
eters can be divided into theoretical calculation method, line
parameter estimation based on supervisory control and data
acquisition (SCADA), and line parameter estimation based on
phasor measurement unit (PMU). The theoretical calculation
method is based on the carson model [5], which uses physical
parameters such as self-geometric mean distance, mutual geo-
metric mean distance and wire material structure [6]. However,
the theoretical analysis simplifies the model and ignores the
influence of uncertain factors, such as real-time temperature,
sag and other practical problems [7], which leads to a big gap
between the theoretical calculation results and the actual values.
As the second method, measurement methods based on the
SCADA data mainly includes two categories: augmented state
estimation methods and measurement residual sensitivity anal-
ysis methods [8]. In augmented state estimation methods, the
parameters are directly estimated as state quantities. Zhao [9] put
forward a augmented matrix estimation method and a Kalman
filtering method respectively. Zhang [10] proposed a distribu-
tion system state estimation (DSSE) method with considering
the characteristics of power electronic loads, and introduced
running state variables and controllable parameters into DSSE.
Rehman [11] and Khazraj [12] proposed constrained weighted
least squares estimation based on virtual measurement for pa-
rameters estimation. Other approaches were the measurement
residual sensitivity analysis methods, which combined param-
eter error sensitivity with weighted least square estimation.
Yang [13] proposed a method of compensating with suspicious
branch power flow instead of estimating parameters. Mousavi’s
work [14] combined PMU and SCADA and employed a non-
linear weighted least-square error algorithm for maximum-
likelihood estimation of parameters.
The third line parameter identification method based on PMU
data, which could directly measure the amplitude and phase
angle of fundamental voltage and current at power frequency,
which provided a new way to identify actual parameters of the
line [15]. Line parameter identification was generally obtained
based on the π-type equivalent model of lumped parameters. Es-
pecially, in order to reduce the influence of noise and deviation,
different robust methods were used to improve accuracy. Com-
bined with Huber criterion and multi-time data superposition, a
recursive estimation of window sliding population robust least
squares was proposed by Ye [16]. Rahman [17] put forward
the improved binary particle swarm (IBPSO) method, which
converged faster and managed to maximize the measurement
redundancy, and the method was verified in IEEE-30 bus system.
 3156
Hu’s work [18] used the adaptive IGG criterion to eliminate the
influence of large deviation data. In Routtenberg’s work [19], a
general model for the PMU output with a downsampled negative
sequence was presented and the method took into account of
computation complexity and imbalance tolerance. Li [20] and
Bretas [21] combined SCADA data and PMU data to improve
estimation accuracy. Mahmood’s work [22] proved that using
Kalman filter for real-time data processing in PMU measure-
ments may contain errors and bad data. In Xue’s work [23],
a new adaptive robust identification method was proposed for
obtaining accuracy parameters in the case of large random
noises in PMU measurements, which effectively improved the
accuracy.
Although there are many ways to obtain the transmission line
parameters, the branch parameter identification method mostly
adopted the line parameter identification technology based on
SCADA data in actual practice [24]. However, the traditional
branch parameter identification methods were mainly based on
single model-driven calculation, which had some problems, such
as poor numerical stability, easy divergence and interference
from residual pollution. Yang’s work [25] proposed a bad data
detection method based on spectral clustering, which effectively
improved data quality. In addition, the cross section of power
grid branch parameter identification was determined and se-
lected by manual experience, which was random and could not
effectively generate actual power grid branch parameters. At the
same time, due to the limitation of traditional branch parameter
identification methods, massive historical data of power system
was not effectively utilized.
Due to the limitation of traditional methods, machine learn-
ing methods could mine the characteristics of data and apply
in branch parameter identification, such as linear regression
(LR), support vector regression (SVR) and random forest (RF),
etc [24]. For example, in Zhang’s work [26], the accurate estima-
tion of line parameters is realized by using LR and model driven
method. Although these methods are better than the previous
methods, they only focused on the node itself, they didn’t paid
sufficient attention to connections between grid nodes. These
methods had the following shortcomings: firstly, the machine
learning methods only considered the historical data of the node
itself. As far as LR method and SVR method, their robustness
were quite poor due to linearity. When there was a little noise in
the data, there would be a great deviation in prediction results.
Secondly, even RF, a bagging method, separated the links from
nodes, even though it could improve the robustness of the model
through voting mechanism. However, it would fall into the
predicament of over-fitting in some noisy branches. It can be
concluded that considering the connection between nodes in
the process of parameter identification helps extract the global
characteristics of power grid branches, and regression prediction
on this basis can effectively resist the noise and disturbance of
local branches, it is more accurate and robust.
Recently, deep learning methods is very popular in various
fields [27], however, among existing parameter identification
methods, there is little literature considers the topology of
power grid, they are more based on single branch historical
data to predict parameter [28]. The successful implementation
of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in voice, image and
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 37, NO. 4, AUGUST 2022
text recognition is a breakthrough. As Euclidean data, voice,
text and image can be well adapted to a CNN model. However,
grid nodes are spatially distributed. As non Euclidean data,
it is difficult to input them directly into a CNN model [29].
Although the input data can be input into a CNN model by
being spliced into two-dimension, in fact, this method will split
the connection between nodes and introduce noise due to mixed
data. To solve the above problems, a multi-task regression model
based on a graph convolution neural network (MT-GCN) is
proposed. As an extension of a convolutional neural network,
this method can deal with non Euclidean data. The adjacency
matrix is constructed according to the topological structure of
branches of the power transmission system. Experiments show
that the proposed deep learning method is superior to existing
experimental methods, it is able to consider the topology and
characteristics of circuit nodes at the same time, and it is able
to accurately fit the parameters of each branch. At the same
time, it has good robustness and is not easily affected by noise.
Besides, the model proposed in this paper can be easily applied
or extended to many tasks related to data measurement and
processing in modern power systems.
The rest of this paper is as follows: In the second part,
we introduce the main structure and principle of the model,
including backbone network and branch network, and briefly
introduce the data set. In the third part, the experimental process
is introduced in detail, including the setting of hyperparame-
ters. The proposed method is compared with several machine
learning methods and deep learning methods, the generalization
performance of the model is also analyzed. In the fourth part,
the influence of K-order neighborhood of MT-GCN model on
model performance is introduced in detail. Finally, our model is
summarized, and the future research direction is put forward.
II. PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION BASED ON MULTI-TASK
GRAPH CONVOLUTION NEURAL NETWORK
This section firstly introduces task requirements, then dis-
cusses the idea of spectral convolutions in graph convolution
neural networks, and constructs a MT-GCN model for branch
parameter identification for power transmission systems.
A. Branch Parameter Identification Task
Given the topology and features of each branch, our goal is
to predict the target parameters of each branch in the power
transmission systems. For a given branch of a power transmis-
sion system, i and j represent the nodes at both ends of the
k-th branch. The measured active powers Pik and Pjk at both
ends of the branch, the measured reactive powers Qki and Qkj ,
the measured voltages Uik and Ujk , and the ground susceptance
y k of the k-th branch can be obtained. The k-th branch input
X k = (Pik , Pjk , Qki , Qkj , Uik , Ujk , y k ) ∈ R7k . The input of the
proposed model can be expressed as X ∈ Rn×7 , n represents the
number of nodes. In this study, the loss function1 is constructed
according to the relationship in the π-type equivalent circuit.
1 Loss function is a function constructed according to the difference between
predicted data and label data, which is usually used to measure the quality of a
model.
 WANG et al.: PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION IN POWER TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS 3157

Fig. 1. Multi-Task graph convolution neural network structure figure (In the
structure of MT-GCN model, each branch is connected with two full connection
layers after the main backbone graph convolution layers).

The following (1) and (2) can be obtained for the k-th branch
through the derivation of π-type equivalent circuit: and FCN model as the branch network to complete the specific
2 2 node task, thus realizing all branch parameter identification
(Pik
+ Pjk )[Pik
+ (Qki+ Uik y k )2 ]
gk = 2 2 2
together.
(Uik [(Pik + Pjk )2 + [Qki + Qkj + (Uik + Ujk )y k ]2 ]) In order to introduce the MT-GCN model, the spectral con-
(1) volution theory is firstly introduced. Assuming that there is an
2 2 2 2
undirected graph G ∈ (V, E, A), where V is the set of n vertices,
k
−[Qki + Qkj + (Uik + Ujk )y k ][Pik + (Qki + Uik y k )2 ] and Vi ∈ V , E is the set of edges in the graph, and Eij ∈ E.
b = . 
2 2 2
(Uik [(Pik + Pjk )2 + [Qki + Qkj + (Uik + Ujk )y k ]2 ]) A ∈ Rn×n is an adjacency matrix, and Dii = j Aij is the
(2) degree matrix. Δp = D − A represents Laplacian matrix on
the unnormalized graph. The Laplace matrix on the graph is
In the above equations, g k is branch conductance and bk is line symmetrically normalized as follows:
susceptance. According to the above equations derived from 1 1 1 1
Δ = D− 2 Δp D− 2 = I − D− 2 AD− 2 , (3)
π-type equivalent circuit, the true values of branch conductance
and line susceptance can be calculated. Therefore, the branch where I is an identity matrix, the Laplacian matrix can be
parameter identification can be defined as a multi-objective spectrally decomposed after symmetric normalization, and the
regression problem. More specifically, given X k , g̃ k and b̃k of Laplacian matrix can be spectrally decomposed, that is eigen-
a branch are obtained by f (X k ), f (x) represents a mapping of decomposition, and the process of eigendecomposition is de-
input X though graph convolution network (GCN) model. The scribed as follows:
algorithm uses the loss function to optimize the output though ⎛ ⎞
λ1 · · · 0
fully connection network (FCN) and obtains the final branch ⎜ ⎟
parameters. The MT-GCN can effectively use the structural Δ = U ΛU −1 = U ⎝ ... . . . ... ⎠ = U ΛU T , (4)
information of the network, construct the relationship between 0 · · · λn
branches, and implicitly fit the structural constraints of the → → →
where U = (u1 , u2 , . . . , un ) is a matrix with column vectors
network, thus improving the accuracy of branch identification
as unit eigenvectors, Λ is a diagonal matrix composed of n
in power transmission system.
eigenvalues Since U is an orthogonal matrix, symmetric normal-
ization Laplacian matrix can be written as Δ = U ΛU T . Similar
B. MT-GCN Model for Parameter Identification
to Fourier transform in Euclidean space, Fourier transform on
The objective of proposed method is to learn a better rep- graph can be defined by eigenvector of Laplace matrix. With
resentation by integrating local features and global topology respect to the signal X ∈ Rn×7 of the vertex on graph G, the
adequately. As illustrated in Fig. 1, MT-GCN has two parts. The Fourier transform on the graph is expressed as X̂ = U T X. In
input X of each branch has 7-dimensional temporal features, the same way, the inverse Fourier transform of X on the graph
and it can be accumulated by graph convolution layers of GCN. is expressed as X = U X̂. Thus, the convolution operation is
The branch network consists of fully connected layers, after extended to the graph according to (5):
feature extraction and aggregation, the output is integrated with
X ∗ g = U ((U T g) ◦ (U T X)), (5)
global information and will be diverted to the branch network for
parameter identification. That is to say, the proposed MT-GCN where ∗ means convolution, and ◦ means the inner product of
model takes GCN as the backbone to aggregate node features, two vectors. If U T g is regarded as a learnable convolution kernel,

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 3158
Fig. 2. Training flow chart of MT-GCN algorithm.
it is written as gθ . Then the convolution formula on the graph is
X ∗ g = U gθ U T X. If gθ = U T g is defined as a filter, that is to
say, gθ = diag(U T g), which is written in the form of a diagonal
matrix, then (6) is obtained:
⎛ ⎞
ĝ(λ1 ) · · · 0 and to add the feature y of Eij to form seven features for
⎜ . .. ⎟
X ∗ g = U gθ U T X = U ⎜ ⎝ .
. ..
. ⎟ T
. ⎠ U X, (6)
0 · · · ĝ(λn )
one of the main disadvantages of (6) is that when the convolution
kernel needs n parameters, that is to say, if there are n nodes in
the graph, and the computation of feature decomposition is very
large, then the computational complexity of the feature matrix
U is O(n2 ). This work uses a first-order approximate ChebShev
polynomial [30] to fit graph convolution kernel. According to
the definition of ChebShev polynomial, the convolution of graph
neural network can be approximately defined as (7):
1 1 1 1
X ∗ gθ = θ(IN + D− 2 AD− 2 )X = θ(D̃− 2 ÃD̃− 2 )X, (7)

where à = A + IN , Dii = j Ãij . The spectral convolu-
tion of (7) applied to our graph is H l+1 = f (H l , A) =
1 1
δ(D̃− 2 AD̃− 2 H (l) W (l) ), H is the feture map of each layer. As
far as graph convolution layers are concerned, the mapping of
1 1
each layer is H (l+1) = δ(D̃− 2 AD̃− 2 H (l) W (l) ). When l = 0,
(l) E×F
H is the input feature X, X ∈ R , in which E reprsents
the number of edges in the graph, and F represents the feature
number of each edge in the graph. The output of the last layer
is flattened into a vector and transmitted to the fully connection
layers. Among them the output Y˜k of the k-th branch parameter
identification of power transmission system can be obtained by
solving Y˜k = F Ck (Xj ), where F Ck represents the mapping
function of the k-th branch. Xj is the j-th fully connected layer.
The whole MT-GCN algorithm training flowchart is shown in
Fig. 2.
In addition to setting the graph convolution multi-task model
according to parameter identification tasks, there are two other
innovations. Firstly, in a graph convolution neural network,
traditional methods construct adjacency matrix according to the
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 37, NO. 4, AUGUST 2022
Fig. 3. Branch topology diagram of power transmission system (structural
representation diagram).
structure of the graph. According to the topological structure
of node i and node j, the adjacency matrix A ∈ Rn×n can be
obtained, but as far as power transmission system parameters
are concerned, Pi , Pj , Qi , Qj , Ui , Uj are the parameters on
the nodes, and y is used as the parameter of node connection.
That target parameters b and g are the parameters of branch
connection in the power transmission system, they are difficult
to be modeled by traditional GCN. Our approach is to unify
the parameters Pi , Pj , Qi , Qj , Ui and Uj at the branch Eij ,
input. In this case, all features converge on the edge, and the
edge is regarded as a node, the node thereby is regarded as a
connecting line of the edge. As a result, the adjacency matrix
is constructed to complete the model input of the MT-GCN. In
addition, the connection between nodes of transmission system
is not only single line connection, but also multi line connection,
which poses a challenge to our model construction. Assuming
that a node has n branches, we need to divide the node Vi
into Vi1 , Vi2 ,... Vin . We split the multi-connected nodes into
single-connected nodes, and then complete the construction of
adjacency matrix. This method is suitable for double or more
branches.
C. Introduction of the Power Transmission System Branch
Parameter Data
The data set of power transmission system used in this work
comes from China Electric Power Research Institute. A topology
is chosen as an example to show the data composition. We trans-
formed its actual topological structure diagram into a structural
representation (as shown in Fig. 3). It can be seen from the
Fig. 3 that the ring network line consists of eleven topological
nodes. Yellow nodes are connected by single branch lines, and
pink nodes are connected by double branch lines. Topology only
indicates how they are connected, not where they are actually
located.
The recorded data is in time sequence. Each node contains
seven features, and the features of all nodes constitute a group
of graph structure data. The data set consists of 1635 groups of
data, and the recorder recorded the data once every 1 minute.
Among them, 1200 sets of data are selected as training sets, 200
sets of data are used as verification sets, and the remaining 235
sets of data are used as testing sets.
 WANG et al.: PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION IN POWER TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS 3159

Fig. 4. Visualization diagram of branch data loss (The horizontal axis repre-
sents the first 200 groups of data, and the vertical axis represents 7 features of 6
branches, with a total of 42 features. The picture shows the result of randomly
losing the whole branch feature).

Fig. 5. Visualization diagram of node feature data loss (The horizontal axis
and vertical axis are the same as the above figure, and the picture shows the Fig. 6. Correlation coefficient diagram of 7 features.
result of randomly losing a certain feature of a branch).

between geoelectric y and several other features is very weak.

For our training set and testing set, considering the problems
that may be encountered in daily power supply system, we added
three kinds of noises. The first kind is Gaussian noise, which
makes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from 30 dB to 50 dB (i.e.,
we design gaussian noise with reference to brown’s work [31]).
The second kind noise considers the loss of node data, it means
the whole edge data is unavailable. We visualize 200 groups in
Fig. 4. It can be seen that the white part is normal data, and the
red part is missing data. We can see that each column consists of
6 edges, and each edge contains 7 features. We set the probability
of edge feature loss to be 1/6, that is to say, we set all the data
of that edge to 0.
The third noise considers feature anomaly, and it means a
feature is different from its normal value, and the data loss can be
shown in Fig. 5. We set the probability of data loss to 0.01, and the
missing data is set to 0 in data processing, which is represented
by red in dots (i.e., the above two kinds of noises are inspired by
chen’s work [32], and this is a fault situation that is likely to occur
in real practice). According to these three kinds of abnormal
conditions, we processed all the data with noise. Results showed
that the proposed MT-GCN model achieved higher accuracy and
stronger robustness compared with traditional methods.
III. EXPERIMENT RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, we perform comparison experiments. Com-
pared with the baseline model, our proposed MT-GCN model
has higher accuracy and better robustness.
A. Implementation Details and Baseline Model
As illustrated in Fig. 1, the model has two graph convolution
layers, the first layer has 512 convolution kernels, and the second
layer has only 384 convolution kernels. There are two fully
connected layers with 256 and 128 hidden nodes following
the second layer. The initial learning rate is 0.0002, the Adam
optimizer is used, and the number of training iterations is 100.
We use PyTorch to implement our model.
As shown in Fig. 6, we analyzed the correlation of seven
features of the input data, which shows that the correlation
Besides, we found that Pi and Pj , Qi and Qj , Ui and Uj , Uj
and Qi have strong correlation. The proposed MT-GCN model
aggregates these features with potential connections, extracts
these features from the graph, and fits the predicted results.
We also compared our model with four baseline models,
including three shallow machine learning algorithms commonly
used in practice (LinearRegression, SVR, RF) and one deep
learning algorithm FCN. In this work, we have implemented
all these algorithms to verify the superior performance of our
model.
In this paper, SVR adopted the radial basis convolution kernel
support vector regression machine with C = 100 and γ = 0.1,
and python scikit-learn library [40] is used to realize the support
vector regression machine. The number of trees is set to 300
for RF, the minimum number of samples per leaf is set to 35,
and the minimum number of samples required for splitting is
set to 3. The fully connected neural network is usually used as
the baseline model. The fully connected neural network model
is divided into two layers, with hidden nodes being 128 and 64
respectively. The linear rectification function (ReLU) is used
as the activation function. After five cross-verifications, we got
the hyper-parameters of SVR, RF. For FCN model, 10% of the
training data was used to calculate the hyperparameters.
In order to prove the reliability of our method in real operation,
we add noise and error to the measurement and compare the
performance of different models.
B. Comparison of Branch Parameter Identification
Performance of Various Models
The branch parameter identification results of evaluation
experiment are shown in Tables I and II. Table I shows the
identification results of various models for line susceptance b.
We use the root mean square error (RMSE) as the evaluation
index. For the MT-GCN model, we repeated the test five times
and recorded the average value of RMSE. According to Table I,
our proposed MT-GCN yields the best results in most cases,
and it shows that the LinearRegression algorithm, which usually
used in practice, performs badly due to overfitting.

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TABLE I
PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION ERROR(RMSE) OF LINE SUSCEPTANCE b OF THE MODEL UNDER DIFFERENT NOISE CORRECTION CONDITIONSS

TABLE II
PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION ERROR(RMSE) OF BRANCH CONDUCTANCE g OF THE MODEL UNDER DIFFERENT NOISE CORRECTION CONDITIONS

Table II shows parameter identification results of branch
conductance g. The MT-GCN model can achieve the highest
fitting accuracy in most cases. The SVR model and the RF model
perform well in some error cases, but the lost node features have
a great influence on RF model, making its accuracy far lower
than the above machine learning models. Similar to Table I, the
LinearRegression algorithm performs badly in robustness test
because of overfitting. It may be because that the complexity
of data sets increases, the accuracy of LightGBM model is far
lower than those of similar machine learning models. In addition,
it can be found from the above table that the identification result
of CNN model is not ideal. As a deep learning model, we suspect
that the noise may be caused by splicing data into two-dimension
in data processing.
According to Tables I and II, it can be observed that the
MT-GCN model has superior performance with errors and
noises to the data, which indicates that the MT-GCN model
can learn and predict the potential representations of nodes
adjacent to nodes. The experimental results show the robustness
of MT-GCN model, and show that this robustness in MT-GCN
model can deal with other types of errors and faults in practice.
Fig. 7 shows the root mean square error (RMSE) and mean
absolute error (MAE) diagrams of line susceptance b and branch
conductance g. As illustrated in Fig. 7(a)–(f) are the fitting curves
of line susceptance b with different noise, and (g)–(I) are the
fitting curves of branch conductance g with different noise, the
number of training epochs is set to 100. Fig. 7 shows the gradual
convergence process of evaluation indexes MAE and RMSE
with the increase of the number of training epochs, where (f)
and (I) are the fitting curves with adding three mixed noises
of Noise50 dB, DropData and DropNode. It can be seen that
the MT-GCN model has the best results. The method proposed
can effectively utilize the structural characteristics of power
grid, which makes the method robust to noise, information loss
and other malicious conditions. The method can improve the
accuracy and reliability of parameter estimation, so it has many
advantages in practice.
C. Influence of K-Order Neighborhood on Graph Neural
Network
According to the above analysis, it can be found that the
graph convolution layer is actually a local filter, which is a linear

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 WANG et al.: PARAMETER IDENTIFICATION IN POWER TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS 3161

Fig. 7. Fitting curves of FCN, CNN and GCN on target parmeters under different noise correction conditions. RMSE and MAE are selected by indicators. (a)-(f)
is about line susceptance b, and (g)-(I) is about branch conductance g. (f) represents the superposition of noise50 dB, DropNode and DropData on line susceptance
b. (I) represents the superposition of Noise50 dB, DropNode and DropData on branch conductance g.

Fig. 8. Neighborhood nodes when k = 1 and k = 2.

combination of neighborhood eigenvectors. We can determine

the K-order neighborhood of vertex aggregation according to
the set number of graph convolution layers, as shown in the
Fig. 8, when k = 1 and k = 2. We set up a graph convolution
neural network with at most 8 graph convolution layers and
analyzed them. The mean absolute error and mean square error
curve are shown in Fig. 9, it shows that the mean absolute error
and root mean square error curve become larger with the increase
of the number of layers in the drawing stack. As can been seen
from Fig. 9 that when k = 1,2 and 3, the MT-GCN model has the
best performance, and its accuracy is the highest. However, when
the neighborhood is larger than 4, the accuracy of the model will
decrease and its generalization performance will deteriorate.
According to our analysis, the graph convolution in GCN
model is a special form of Laplace smoothing. This smoothing
Fig. 9. Error comparative experiment of k-order neighbors of line susceptance
b without increasing noise.
operation can aggregate the features of a vertex and its surround-
ing points, but the aggregation of deep GCN also brings the
problem of over-fitting, which makes it difficult to distinguish
the features between nodes. In other words, when the number of
stacked layers is too large, the features of a node will aggregate
more and more neighbors’ features, making the node and its
neighbors similar, and thus increasing the similarity between
classes. It will naturally lead to the decline of the accuracy and
generalization performance.

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 3162
IV. CONCLUSION
With the rapid development of UHV AC/DC hybrid power
grid system, higher requirements are needed for real-time anal-
ysis. As the first to apply graph neural network theory to power
transmission system, this paper proposes a novel multi-task
graph convolutional neural network (MT-GCN) to identify the
branch parameters of the whole grid nodes. The MT-GCN uses
graph convolutional network (GCN) and fully convolutional
network (FCN) as building blocks. Specially, GCN is used
to gather the information of neighboring nodes. It can extract
the structure information of the power transmission systems to
enhance the local feature extraction. FCN is designed to decode
the fusion information of GCN module according to multiple
fully connected neural networks. Experimental results verify the
effectiveness and robustness of our proposed MT-GCN.
This paper puts forward a flexible and widely applicable
framework, which can be used in branch parameter identification
for the power transmission system, and it opens up a new
research direction. However, there are still some shortcomings
in parameter identification of the power transmission system,
which are as follows: (1) The faults encountered in real practice
are more complicated, and it is still a problem that if the MT-
GCN model can effectively deal with; (2) The adjacency matrix
of GCN model needs to be reconstructed in case of node change
or network reconfiguration in the power transmission system
topology, and it is not known whether the MT-GCN model can
adapt to this dynamic topology model.
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Zhiwei Wang received the B.S. degree in electrical
engineering and automation from Yanshan Univer-
sity, China. He is currently working toward the mas-
ter’s degree with the Control science and Engineer-
ing, Nanjing University of Information Science and
Technology (NUIST), Nanjing. His current interests
include machine learning and its application in power
system.
Min Xia (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree
in cybernetics control engineering from Donghua
University, Shanghai, China. He is currently a Pro-
fessor with the Nanjing University of Information
Science and Technology. He is currently the Deputy
Director of Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Big Data
analysis technology. His Principal research interests
include machine learning theory and its application,
graph structure data analysis.
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3163
Min Lu received the master’s degree in computer
and its application from North China Electric Power
University, BaoDing, China, in 2005. Since 2010,
she has been a Senior Engineer of electric power.
Her current research interests cover power system
automation technology, distributed AI technology,
big data analysis.
Lingling Pan received the master’s degree in power
system and automation engineering from the Shang-
hai University of Electric Power, Shanghai, China,
in 2010. Since 2012, she has been a Researcher
with Dispatching Automation System Department,
China Electric Power Research Institute Company,
Ltd., Nanjing. Her current research interests cover
source-grid-load-storage collaborative control, power
grid simulation, and data analysis.
Jun Liu received the master’s degree in power system
and automation engineering from the Nanjing Uni-
versity of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China,
in 2008. He is currently engaged in research on dis-
patching automation system in China Electric Power
Research Institute (CEPRI). His current research
interests cover parameter identification, power grid
analysis, and dispatcher training simulation (DTS).