IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO.
1, JANUARY 2023
Unrolled Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional
Network for Distribution System State
Estimation and Forecasting
Huayi Wu , Student Member, IEEE, Zhao Xu , Senior Member, IEEE, and Minghao Wang , Member, IEEE
Abstract—Timely perception of distribution system states is
critical for the control and operation of power grids. Recently, it
has been seriously challenged by the dramatic voltage fluctuations
induced by high renewables. To address this issue, an Unrolled
Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (USGCN) is pro-
posed for distribution system state estimation (DSSE) and fore-
casting with augmented consideration of the underlying complex
spatiotemporal correlations of renewable energy sources (RES).
Specifically, the interconnection among individual spatial graphs
of adjacent time steps will lead to an unrolled spatiotemporal
graph and benefit the synchronous capture of spatial and temporal
correlations to achieve enhanced accuracy. On top of this, the
node-embedding technique is employed in the unrolled spatiotem-
poral convolutional layer to reveal the hidden nonlinear spatiotem-
poral correlations of RES outputs without relying on full prior
knowledge. Moreover, the proposed USGCN stacks the unrolled
spatiotemporal convolutional layers, leading to the perception of
longtime correlations to obtain effective ahead-of-time state fore-
casting results robustly. The simulation results have been provided
to verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model in
118-node and 1746-node distribution systems.
Index Terms—Distribution system state estimation and
forecasting, spatiotemporal correlation, node embedding, graph
convolutional network, renewable energy.
I. INTRODUCTION
CTIVE distribution systems generally have dramatically
A uncertain system states due to the continuous variations
rendered by the increasingly deep penetration of renewable
Manuscript received 3 May 2022; revised 25 July 2022; accepted 11 Septem-
ber 2022. Date of publication 4 October 2022; date of current version 19
December 2022. This work was supported in part by the PolyU under Grants
G-SB4D and 1-YY4T. The work of Minghao Wang was supported in part by
the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 62101473 and
in part by Environment and Conservation Fund & Woo Wheelock Green Fund
under Grant 108/2021. Paper no. TSTE-00452-2022. (Coresponding author:
Zhao Xu.)
Huayi Wu and Zhao Xu are with the Research Institute for Smart Energy
(RISE) and the Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytech-
nic University, Hong Kong, SAR, China (e-mail: huayi22.wu@polyu.edu.hk;
eezhaoxu@polyu.edu.hk).
Minghao Wang is with the Research Institute for Smart Energy (RISE), and
Power Electronics research Center, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hong Kong, SAR, China, and also with the Shenzhen Research Institute of
the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Shenzhen, China (e-mail: minghao.
wang@polyu.edu.hk).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSTE.2022.3211706.
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297
generators [1]. Such billow of uncertainties has brought sig-
nificant challenges to the reliable monitoring, stable control and
economic operation of power systems [2]. The DSSE receives
much academic attention as it plays a pivotal role in the real-time
perception of grid states for delivering enhanced monitoring,
control, and management functionalities [3]. Correspondingly,
it is necessary to build an effective and efficient model to
implement DSSE in power system industries.
Since locations of RES in distribution systems are geograph-
ically close to each other and the associated environments
are generally similar, RES generations, including wind power
generators and solar panels, in these distribution systems will
have interrelated power patterns [4]. Therefore, the patterns of
renewable generation will have significant and complex spa-
tiotemporal correlations, leading to hidden complex spatiotem-
poral correlations among nodal measurements of distribution
systems [5]. Firstly, each node of the distribution system can
be directly influenced by its neighbor nodes at the current
time step due to spatial correlation. Secondly, each node will
be self-influenced at the next time step due to the temporal
correlations in the time series. Thirdly, each node can be further
influenced by its neighbor nodes at the next time step due to
the synchronous spatiotemporal correlations. This phenomenon
will bring significant bias in system state estimation, render-
ing an urgent challenge in state estimation and forecasting of
distribution systems, thus poses threaten in distribution system
operation [6]. However, such spatiotemporal correlations are
usually neglected in most DSSE, and the independent Gaussian
distribution of RES output is predominantly assumed. It is
becoming increasingly critical to develop a suitable model to
achieve accurate distribution system estimation.
The most classical algorithms for DSSE are based on a
weighted least square (WLS) where the measurement resid-
ual is minimized. The Gauss-Newton algorithm is applied to
solve this nonconvex optimization problem iteratively [7]. The
WLS-based state estimation is generally based on the assumed
independent measurements. However, such a method may not
adapt to the inevitable correlation measurements, which may
introduce a significant error in system estimates [8]. To this end,
in [9], the linear correlation coefficient matrix is utilized as the
weighting matrix to alleviate the correlation impact on DSSE in
the WLS estimation, leading to improved accuracy. Similarly,
the correlation among nodal measurements is employed in [10]
298
to form the weighting matrix to improve the estimation accuracy.
An artificial neural network is applied in [11] to obtain the
spatial correlations of measurements to construct the correlation
coefficient matrix, which is utilized to enhance the WLS-based
state estimation for microgrids. However, temporal correlations
are not considered in this WLS-correlation coefficient matrix,
which ignores the impact of the dramatical time-series fluctua-
tions of the renewable energy resources. Therefore, the current
system operation states will not be predicted accurately.
Traditional DSSE is conducted based on instantaneous mea-
surements without incorporating historical data. Considering the
temporal correlations, the valuable information extracted from
time-series measurement data will facilitate the conventional
DSSE methods. In [12] the temporal correlations among dis-
tributed generators are considered in an augmented unscented
Kalman filter based state estimation method, leading to en-
hanced accuracy. An augmented Complex Kalman filter (CKF)
is proposed in [13] to model time-series measurement changes
to reduce estimation errors. However, the reported works only
consider single temporal correlations of measurements, which is
non-adaptive to stochastic uncertainty of RES in real-time state
estimation with spatial correlations. To adress this issue, condi-
tional multivariate complex Gaussian distributions are focused
in [6] to model the spatiotemporal correlations of renewable
resources and unbalanced loads to improve the accuracy of
traditional DSSE, where full knowledge of such correlations
is required. A vector autoregressive model is proposed in [14] to
model characteristics of both the spatial and temporal correlation
among loads and DGs to aid the classical DSSE, improving
state forecasting accuracy. However, these methods are compu-
tationally intensive and challenged by growing system scale and
uncertainties.
To alleviate the computational burden, learning-based meth-
ods are becoming popular to forecast the power system states. An
artificial neural network is proposed in [15] to reduce the com-
putational cost and improves the accuracy. The full data-driven
physics-guided deep learning model is introduced in [16] to learn
the state estimation model considering the temporal correlations
of nodal measurements. Physics-inspired deep neural networks
(DNNs) are reported in [17] for real-time state estimation of
transmission systems, achieving improved accuracy. A deep
learning model is proposed in [18] to achieve real-time state
estimations. These data-driven approaches can enhance calcu-
lation speed. Nevertheless, the spatiotemporal correlations of
measurements are generally ignored. The spatial-temporal graph
convolutional network (STGCN) has attracted more and more
attention in different fields, such as traffic forecasting [19],
social pedestrian behavior prediction [20], skeleton-based ac-
tion recognition [21], and so on. They capture the correlations
from the data to achieve enhanced performance. However, these
works treat the spatial and temporal correlations separately,
which ignore the spatiotemporal correlations and may lead to
unsatisfactory results. To address this issue, a spatial-temporal
synchronous graph convolutional network is proposed for net-
work data forecasting to consider the spatiotemporal simulta-
neously [22]. The graphical structure properties of the power
system and the spatial-temporal graph convolutional network
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023
techniques inspire a new way to consider the correlations’
impact on distribution system state estimation. Therefore, it is
unprecedentedly essential to leverage the spatiotemporal corre-
lations to enhance the real-time state estimation performance
with simultaneous spatiotemporal correlations.
In this study, a USGCN model is proposed for distribu-
tion system state estimation and forecasting considering the
spatiotemporal correlations of power injections. Specifically, a
novel unrolled spatiotemporal graph model (USG) formed by
splicing the spatial graphs of adjacent time steps is proposed
to capture three aspects of spatiotemporal correlations simul-
taneously. In this way, enhanced state estimation accuracy and
computational efficiency can be achieved. Based on USG, an
adaptive USG with the node-embedding technique leveraged
to character the unrolled graphs is further proposed to cap-
ture the nonlinear spatiotemporal correlations automatically.
Then, on top of the adaptive USG model, a novel framework
of USGCN is proposed for state estimation. Furthermore, the
USGCN with multiple adaptive USG layers is proposed to
capture long-range spatiotemporal correlations so that state
forecasting can be achieved effectively. The experiments are
conducted on 118-node and 1746-node distribution systems. The
contributions can be summarized threefold.
1) Different from the previous works that treat the spatial
and temporal correlations of the measurement data separately,
a USG formed by splicing the spatial graphs of adjacent time
steps is proposed to capture the spatiotemporal correlations
synchronously so that the improved state estimation results can
be achieved.
2) Instead of utilizing a fixed correlation coefficient matrix
to characterize the linear correlations, the adaptive USG model
leverages the node embedding to characterize the unrolled spa-
tiotemporal graphs automatically to capture the dynamic corre-
lations to achieve high accuracy in state estimation.
3) Unlike the traditional DSSE implemented based on the
current time measurements, leveraging multi-module layers, the
USGCN can capture long-range spatiotemporal correlations to
gain enhanced ahead-of-horizon states effectively.
The remaining sections are organized as follows. The state es-
timation model of the distribution system based on the Bayesian
rule is introduced in Section II. The USGCN model is proposed
in Section III, and the framework of the USGCN is proposed
in Section IV. The results and the analyses are presented in
Section V. Finally, the conclusion of this study is summarized
in Section VI.
II. STATE ESTIMATION BASED ON BAYESIAN RULE
The classical DSSE model can be expressed as
z = h(x) + e (1)
In (1), z is the vector of measurements obtained by the mea-
surement devices. h is the measurement function for mapping
the true state variable vector x, to the measurement vector. e
denotes the vector of measurement errors. The classical state
WU et al.: UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK FOR (DSSE) AND FORECASTING
estimation can be modeled as the WLS optimization problem:
x̂ = arg min(z − h(x))T W (z − h(x)) (2)
x
In (2), x̂ is the estimated state vector, T is the matrix transposi-
tion operation and W denotes the weight matrix. However, this
method can only deal with independent Gaussian distribution of
measurements, it is not feasible for DSSE with the complex cor-
relations of high-penetrated RES [23]. To address this issue, the
Bayesian rule can be used to construct the posterior distribution
for estimating states under given the measurements:
f (z|x)f (x)
f (x|z) = . (3)
f (z)
In (3), f (x|z) is the posterior probability density function (PDF)
of the state variables. f (z|x) is the conditional PDF of the
measurements that can be obtained by the maximum likelihood
function of the state variables under the given measurements
set. f (x) is the prior distribution of the state variables, and f (z)
is the distribution of the measurements. However, due to the
uncertain and intermittent nature of the RES outputs, it is highly
difficult to obtain a complex distribution function to describe
f (x|z). Besides, plenty of historical measurements is required
to conduct f (z), which is not practical due to the low observ-
ability of the distribution system. These difficulties inspire the
practice of obtaining the estimation states based on the posterior
conditional distribution. Specifically, given the measurements
z, the estimation state x̂ is equivalent to the expectation of the
posterior conditional distribution f (x|z). This is calculated by
the following formulation.

x̂ = E[x|z] = αfα|z (α|z)dα (4)
In (4), the integral operation is performed in the whole state
space and α represents the integration variable that can span
all the values x. Thus, the state estimation can be transferred
to calculate the expectation of this posterior distribution, which
can be approximated by the proposed model.
x̂ = E[x|z] = h(x) (5)
In (5), x also denotes the several layers [h0 , . . . , hl , · · · hout ] of
the proposed USGCN model.
III. UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL
NETWORKS
A. Unrolled Spatiotemporal Graph
Conventionally, the previous models introduced the convolu-
tional neural network (CNN) into the recurrent neural network
(RNN) to capture the spatial and temporal correlations, while
CNN can only feature the Euclidian data structure [24]. As a
result, it may not be efficient for state estimation due to the
non-Euclidian graphical structure essence of the power system.
To this end, the graph neural network (GNN) is combined
with the RNN to improve the non-Euclidian data feature ex-
traction [25]. However, these models capture the spatial and
temporal correlations separately without exploring correlations
across time among different nodes, which cannot fully leverage
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299
Fig. 1. Unrolled Spatiotemporal Graph Structure.
the information hidden in the measurements and thus leads
to unsatisfactory accuracy. Thus, an unrolled spatiotemporal
graph model is proposed to capture the spatial and temporal
correlations simultaneously. Specifically, the unrolled operation
means that spatial graphs of adjacent time steps are spliced into
one bigger graph. In this way, the impact of each node by its
neighbors within the current and the adjacent time steps can be
extracted directly and synchronously. On the contrary, without
the unrolled operation, the spatiotemporal correlations among
different nodes across different time steps cannot be intuitively
captured. The concept of unrolled operation can be illustrated
in Fig. 1.
To embed the nodal measurements through a graph structure,
each measuring site can be described by a node, and the correla-
tions among different nodes can be depicted as edges. A graph
G = (V, E) represents the spatial correlations between nodes,
where V = {v1 , . . . , vi , . . . vN } is the set of all nodes with the
number of N and E is the set of edges with the number of L
[26]. To describe this graph structure quantitatively, the adjacent
matrix A ∈ RN ×N is introduced such that:

1, if vi , vj ∈ V, and (vi , vj ) ∈ E
Aij = (6)
0, else
Since the aim is to model spatial and temporal correlations
synchronously across time steps, the intuitive practice is to
connect all graphs representing the spatial correlation with
themselves at the adjacent time steps, as shown in Fig. 1(b). By
connecting the graph of all the nodes belonging to the previous,
current, and next time slots, a spatiotemporal graph is obtained,
which is denoted by the adjacent matrix à ∈ R3N ×3N . For
each node in the spatial graph, its new index can be calculated
by (t − 1)N + i, where t(1 ≤ t ≤ 3) indicates the time step
number in the spatiotemporal graph model. In Fig. 1(b), the
elements Aij in Atadp 1
present the spatial correlation between
node i and node j in time step t1 . The diagonal elements Aii
(t1 −t2 )
in Aadp denote the temporal correlation of node i across
the time steps t1 and t2 . The off-diagonal elements Aij in
(t1 −t2 )
Aadp denote the spatiotemporal correlation of node i and
node j across the time steps t1 and t2 . In a word, the unrolled
spatiotemporal graph across three continuous time steps. The
diagonal adjacency matrices denote the spatial correlation of
each node with others in the current time step. The diagonal
elements of the off-diagonal adjacency matrix represent the
temporal correlation of each node with itself. The non-diagonal
elements of the off-diagonal adjacency matrix represent the
300 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023

spatiotemporal correlation of each node with other nodes across to its neighbors via certain transition probabilities and the model
time steps. This process shows that the correlations between each can converge after a finite number of diffusion steps. Generally,
node and its spatiotemporal neighbors can be captured directly the diffusion convolutional operation is formulated as:
via the unrolled spatiotemporal graph model.

M

(l)
h = P m h(l−1) W m ∈ R3N ×D (9)
B. Self-Adaptive Unrolled Spatiotemporal Graph m=0

It is crucial to build a graph model to describe the adjacent In (9). P m represents the power series of the transition
matrix representing the correlations. Traditionally, the historical matrix. Since the nodal measurement data can be modeled as
nodal measurements can be used to model the deterministic spa- an undirected graph, such that P m = Ã/rowsum(Ã), where
tial correlations using the static correlation coefficient matrix. rowsum computes column sums across rows of Ã. By combin-
However, spatial and temporal correlations are usually dynamic ing the pre-defined self-adaptive spatiotemporal graph model
over time. The deterministic spatial representation model, adja- and the diffusion operation, the spatiotemporal graph convolu-
cency matrix A ∈ RN ×N , may not be appropriate to character- tional layer can be defined as:
ize such dynamic essence. It is the benefit of node-embedding

M
˜
(n) 
technique with the powerful ability in dependence representa- h(l) = P m h(l−1) W m1 + Aadp h(l−1) W m2 ∈ R3N ×D
tion [27] that motivates this study to employ it to formulate the m=0
learning model of implicit spatiotemporal correlation. Thus, a (10)
self-adaptive adjacency matrix à ∈ R3N ×3N is proposed for When the graph structure is not available, there remains the
each time step without requiring any prior knowledge. The hid- self-adaptive spatiotemporal graph term in the spatiotemporal
den complex spatiotemporal correlations can be automatically graph convolutional layer:
discovered through this model during the learning process. This ˜
(n) 
self-adaptive adjacency matrix can be achieved by randomly h(l) = Aadp h(l−1) W m2 ∈ R3N ×D (11)
initializing two node embeddings with learnable parameters
E 1 , E 2 ∈ R3N ×k , where k denotes the dimension of embedding D. Gated Operation
vector. Gated linear units (GLU) are a typical mechanism in neural
networks. It is powerful to control which node’s information
Ãadp = Sof tM ax(ReLU (E 1 E T2 )) (7)
flow can be passed to the next layer during graph convolutional
The node embedding vectors E 1 and E 2 present two mea- operations [31]. The gated graph convolutional layer can be
sured nodes, respectively. The multiplied value of E 1 and E 2 described as follow:
is used to denote the spatial correlation weight between the cor- 
M
˜
(n)
responding two nodes. The ReLU activation function is utilized h(l) = P m h(l−1) W m1 + Aadp h(l−1) W m2
to eliminate weak connections, while the SoftMax activation m=0
function is employed to normalize the self-adaptive adjacency  

M
˜
(n) 
m (l−1)
matrix. ⊗σ P h W m1 + Aadp h(l−1) W m2 ∈ R3N ×D
m=0
C. Unrolled Spatiotemporal Graph Convolution Layer (12)
   
Different from the traditional convolutional operation only In (12), W 1 ∈ RD×D , W 2 ∈ RD×D , b1 ∈ RD , b2 ∈ RD
implemented on Euclidean pixel structure, the graph convolution are learnable parameters, sigmoid denotes the sigmoid activa-
is a typical operation to extract a node’s features over a given tion function (sigmoid(x) = 1/(1 + e−x )), ⊗ represents the
non-Euclidean graph structure [28]. From a spatial perspective, element-wise product. To increase the receptive field of the
it can aggregate and transform the nodes’ arbitrary neighbour- graph convolutional operation to capture the spatiotemporal
hood information to achieve efficiency for implementation in correlations, the proposed graph convolutional operations are
most graph structures [29]. Let Ã(n) ∈ R3N ×3N denotes the multiply stacked.
normalized adjacency of the spatiotemporal graph model with

self-loops, h(l−1) ∈ R3N ×D is the input of the l-th graph con- IV. FRAMEWORK OF USGCN
(l) 3N ×D 
volutional layer. h ∈ R is the output of the l-th graph A. Usgcn for Dsse
convolutional layer, where D is the dimension of the output.
 
W ∈ RD×D and b ∈ RD denote the learnable parameters, σ The historical measurement data with spatial and temporal
denotes the activation function, such as ReLU. The unrolled correlations can be used to facilitate the DSSE. The proposed
spatiotemporal graph convolutional layer can be defined as: USGCN is utilized to learn the expectation of the posterior con-
ditional distribution (5) that accounts for the spatial and temporal

h(l) = U SGCN (h(l−1) ) = σ(Ã(n) h(l−1) W + b) ∈ R3N ×D correlations hidden in the measurement data. To achieve this
(8) goal, the proposed unrolled spatiotemporal graph convolution
A diffusion convolution layer proposed by [30] is proved with operation and the gated operation are utilized to construct the
the excellent ability to handle spatiotemporal modeling effec- USGCN for state estimation and state forecasting. Unlike the
tively. In such an operation, the node’s information is transferred popular graph convolutional network that can only capture

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WU et al.: UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK FOR (DSSE) AND FORECASTING
Fig. 2. (a) The structure of the USGCN for DSSE. (b) The structure of the
USGCN for state forecasting.
the spatial correlation, the proposed USG model can take the
spatiotemporal correlations into account to enhance the state
estimation accuracy.
The framework of USGCN for state estimation is shown in
Fig. 2(a). This framework consists of a USGCN layer, three CNN
layers, and a fully connected neural network layer as the output
layer. The USGCN layer is utilized to capture the spatiotemporal
correlations and form the latent features for each node in the
unrolled graph. These features are aggregated by the following
CNN layers to map the extracted features to the system states.
The measurement data includes the active and reactive power
injections, denoted by Z ∈ RN ×C×T , where N is the number of
system nodes. T is the sequence length. C is the hidden dimen-
sion, which presents the measurement data in each node, e.g. four
dimensions include the nodal active/reactive power injection and
active/reactive line flow. Note that the measurement data consists
of the active/reactive power injections and the active/reactive
line power flows, which are available from smart meters. Since
the estimated states are the voltage magnitudes and the phase
angles, the number of the measurements is satisfied with the
observability without full deploying instruments in all nodes,
e.g. above 50% of the system node number. Generally, the branch
number in the distribution system is less than the node number
due to the radial structure, so the first dimension N is enough
for nodal and line measurements. Note that the nodal and line
input without the measurements are replaced with zero value.
The measurement data Z ∈ RN ×C×T is then utilized to
extract the slices of unrolled spatiotemporal graphs’ series as
h0s ∈ RN ×C×3 , which can be reshaped h0s ∈ R3N ×C×1 . In each
slice, each node aggregates its own features and neighbors at cur-
rent and adjacent time steps in the unrolled spatiotemporal graph
convolutional operation. The aggregate function is described by
embeddings whose weights equal the correlations among the
nodes and their neighbors. Based on this process, the slices of
T-2 unrolled spatiotemporal graphs of different time steps can
be obtained. By splicing these spatiotemporal graphs by row, the
input h0 ∈ R3N ×C×(T −2) of USGCN can be obtained.
Based on the definition of the input and the USGCN, the
output of the unrolled spatiotemporal graph convolutional layer

is hl ∈ R3N ×C ×(T −2) , where C  is the hidden dimension of
the layer. To obtain the target channel dimensional of fea-
tures in each node, the 2-d convolutional neural network lay-
 
ers are also utilized to transfer the hl ∈ R3N ×C ×(T −2) into
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301

hl ∈ R3N ×C ×(T −2) . Besides, the fully connected network is
employed to transfer the 3N dimensional into Nout so that
the target output dimensional can be achieved. Therefore, the

output of the proposed USGCN is hout ∈ RNout ×C ×(T −2) .
 
C is the hidden dimension of the layer, e.g. C = 2 means
two dimensions of channels, presenting the voltage magnitude
and the voltage phase angle. Nout is the number of voltage
magnitudes and phase angles.
The Huber loss [32] is utilized as the loss function, which
is less sensitive to outliers than the mean squared error loss
and has continuous derivatives compared with mean absolute
error. Although Log-Cosh loss has the Huber loss’s mentioned
advantages, it is less adaptive due to a fixed gradient for signifi-
cant error. In (13) h denotes the ground truth and ĥ denotes the
prediction of the model, δ is the threshold that controls the range
of squared error loss.
 (t+j) (t+j)
1    0.5(ĥik − hik )2 ,
N j=T k=C
Loss(ĥ, h) = (t+j) (t+j)
.
T N C i=1 j=4
k=1 δ|ĥik − hik | − 0.5δ 2
(13)
B. USGCN for State Forecasting
Generally, the predicted states are corrected relying on com-
plete real-time measurements. Then the corrected states are uti-
lized to predict the following single-step system states [17], such
that the predicted states rely on the accuracy of the previously
estimated states. Instead of utilizing the previously estimated
states, the proposed method can directly forecast the system
states based on the previous measurements. In this way, the
proposed method can fully leverage the spatial and temporal cor-
relation features in measurements to forecast the states directly
with available measurements so that improved awareness on sys-
tem states ahead of time can be achieved. Furthermore, instead
of using the recurrent neural network to capture only temporal
correlations, the proposed USG model can intuitively extract the
spatial and temporal correlations synchronously characterized
by graphical structure. In this way, the correlation information
is extracted according to their statistical dependence to achieve
improved forecasting accuracy.
The framework of USGCN for state forecasting is shown in
Fig. 2(b). Different from the USGCN for DSSE, it consists of two
stacked spatiotemporal graph convolutional layers, three CNN
layers, and a fully connected neural network layer. By stacking
multiple spatiotemporal graph convolutional layers, USGCN
can perceive spatiotemporal correlations across adjacent time
steps as well as more than adjacent time steps.
Different from the previous works like [24] that generate the
time-series ht recursively through T time steps, the USGCN
can directly output the h(t+1):(t+T ) within all T time steps
as a whole. In this way, the problem of inconsistency between
training and testing data caused by the fact that a model learns to
make forecasting for a one-time slot during the training process
can be addressed. Specifically, to achieve this, the temporal
dimension of the last spatiotemporal layer is set to equal T − 3.
In this way, the input of the USGCN for state forecasting is
h0 ∈ R3N ×C×(T −3) and the output is hout ∈ RNout ×C ×(T −3) .
302 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023

C  . It is noted that learning parameters of spatiotemporal con-

volutional layers are designed to be shared during all time steps
to achieve enhanced efficiency.

V. CASE STUDY
A 11 kV 118-node distribution system with six feeders [33],
and a 130.8 kV 1746-node distribution system with 14 feed-
ers [34] are employed to investigate the performance of the
Fig. 3. Historical data of wind power and solar power output with each curve
proposed model. Since it is difficult to collect the historical depicting one day.
measurements and states of real power systems, the real wind,
and solar power output data are extracted from the 2012 Global
Energy Forecasting Competition, which is used to produce the
training and testing datasets. The Matpower is used to perform
the AC power flow equations to obtain the voltage magnitudes
(V m ) and the voltage phase angles (V a ) and produce measure-
ments. The measurement data includes the active/reactive power
injections and the active/reactive line power flows, which can be
collected from smart meters. The number of the measurement
data collected from the smart meters is set at 55% of the system
node number, which is available due to the proliferation of smart
meters. These measurement data are the input of the proposed
model, and the voltage magnitudes and phase angles are the Fig. 4. The average correlation coefficient of the RES output.
output. The measurement noise distribution is the gaussian with
zero mean and 1% of the expected measurements as the standard
TABLE I
deviation. Specifically, the noises for each measurement data THE LOCATIONS OF RENEWABLE ENERGY
collected by the same device are with the same error values
in different time step. After this data preparation process, the
data sizes of the 118-node distribution system and 1746-node
distribution system are set to be near 1500 K, and 20000 K,
respectively with 90% as the training data and 10% as the test
data. The training process is conducted on an NVIDIA GeForce
GTX 3090 with 24 GB RAM, using Python as the programming
language and running in windows 10. The environment utilized is set 10−12 . These hyperparameters are optimized by random
to implement the proposed model is Python 3.7 with PyTorch searching selection. The number of epochs is determined by
1.7. To alleviate randomness in the obtained weight parameters, observing the training and test error during the training process
all proposed models are trained and tested independently 20 of the proposed model and is selected to be 10000.
times. 3) Renewable Energy Sources setting: Historical data of total
1) Performance indexes of the proposed model: The per- several RES units, including wind turbine and photovoltaic
formance of the proposed model is verified by compar- outputs, is shown in Fig. 3. The rated output of one location with
ing it with various state-of-the-art methods using the fol- wind turbines is 0.06 MW. And the rated power of photovoltaic is
lowingevaluation indexes, Mean Absolute Error, M AE = 0.08 MW. And the average correlation matrix of the wind power
1 nsam
Nsam i=1 |ĥi − hi |, Mean Absolute Percentage Error, and photovoltaic power is depicted in Fig. 4, which shows a
1
nsam ĥi −hi
M AP E = Nsam i=1 | hi | × 100%, Root Mean Square
high active correlation (close to 1) among wind turbine outputs
1
nsam 2 and photovoltaic outputs, respectively. The negative correlation
Error, RM SE = Nsam i=1 (ĥi − hi ) , where ĥi de- coefficient between wind turbine output and photovoltaic output
notes the estimated value of the proposed model and the other reflects the multiple complexities of the prediction task.
baseline methods; hi is the ground-true value of the correspond-
ing estimated value.
A. The Performance of USGCN in State Estimation
2) Hyperparameters setting: The channels of the 2-D CNN are
set at 4, 8, and 2, and the corresponding kernel sizes are set (5,1) 1) In Comparision With Troditional Methods: To investigate
to ensure that the CNN can aggregate the information across the impact of correlation of measurement data in traditional
5 nodes. Three CNN layers are formed to avoid overfitting. distribution state estimation, the conventional DSSE methods
The dimension of the node embedding is set at 10. The batch including the weight (Weighted Least Squares) WLS [35], (Least
size is set at 1000. The learning rate of the proposed model is Absolute Value) LAV [36] are employed, which are solved by
set at 0.01 at the beginning and exponentially decays with an the Gaussian-Newton algorithm. The reference voltage phase
increasing number of epochs. The regularization parameter λ angle is set at 0 rd.

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WU et al.: UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK FOR (DSSE) AND FORECASTING 303

TABLE II
THE EVALUATION INDEX OF USGCN COMPARED WITH TRADITIONAL
METHODS WITH AND WITHOUT CORRELATIONS

Since the historical data of the wind and solar power out-
puts shown in Fig. 3 are available with correlations, the state
estimation on traditional methods and the proposed USGCN
with and without correlations are investigated. The outputs of
wind turbines and photovoltaic without correlations are gen-
erated following the independent normal distribution with the Fig. 5. The estimated value of voltage magnitudes and phase angles of node
rated power as the mean and its 15% as the standard devia- 121 of the 1747-node distribution system.
tion. Then, similarly, the power flow is conducted to produce
the measurement data with 1% noise. The state estimation is
conducted in 480 scenarios for WLS and LAV, respectively.
The corresponding average MAE, MAPE, and RMSE results
of conventional methods and USGCN are listed in Table II.
Without correlations, the traditional methods WLS and LAV
give a relatively low result in MAE, MAPE, and RMSE. The
evaluation results of USGCN are consistent with that of the
traditional methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the
traditional methods and USGCN in state estimation. However,
with correlations, there are higher MAE and RMSE results Fig. 6. The estimation time of USGCN and traditional methods.
of voltage phase angle from traditional methods than without
correlation considered. Specifically, in the 118-node distribution
system with correlations, the USGCN reduces the MAE of volt- can significantly impact the distribution system state estimation
age magnitudes by 91.77% and 91.79% compared with the WLS function and thus have a negative influence on the system
and LAV, respectively. The MAPE is also reduced by 91.82% operation. Besides, the state estimated voltage magnitudes and
and 91.82% compared to the WLS and LAV. Besides, for the phases angles are also depicted in Fig. 5. It intuitively shows that
1746-node distribution system, the USGCN also outperforms the voltage magnitudes and phases angles from the proposed
WLS and LAV by 85.64%, 85.64% in MAE, and 85.21%, USGCN have a smaller bias with the corresponding real value
85.21% in the MAPE of voltage magnitudes, respectively. The in comparison with the traditional WLS and LAV methods.
RMSE for voltage magnitudes are also lower than the traditional Furthermore, the running time of the USGCN and the tradi-
methods. The MAE, MAPE, and RMSE in voltage phase angles tional methods of 118-node and 1746-node systems are repre-
of the USGCN state estimation results considered either with or sented in Fig. 6, which shows that the computational times of
without correlation are also lower than the traditional methods. WLS, LAV, USGCN are 0.1758, 0.0624, and 0.0006 s for the
This is due to the excellent ability of the USGCN in complex 118-node system, and 0.0928, 0.5201, 0.0064 s for 1746-node
spatiotemporal correlation modeling. system, respectively. The computation time of the USGCN is
The state estimation value of voltage magnitudes and phase less than 1 ms, while that of the traditional methods is upon
angles of node 121 of the 1746-node distribution system is shown 60 ms. The proposed model is about 100 times faster, indicating
in Fig. 5. It presents that the bias between voltage magnitudes that it can be implemented in real-time for distribution systems.
estimated by the high correlation measurement and the real value This is because the proposed USGCN can learn the expec-
is more than that without correlation measurement. Similarly, the tation of the posterior conditional distribution that describes
deviation of the estimated value of the voltage phase angle from the complex relationship between the measurements and the
the true value also has the same law. This demonstrates that the system states. In this way, the USGCN directly performs state
correlations brought by the dependent pattern of the RES output estimation different from traditional methods that involve many

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304 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023

TABLE III
THE EVALUATION INDEX IN STATE ESTIMATION OF USGCN IN COMPARISON
WITH DATA-DRIVEN METHODS WITH CORRELATIONS

time-consuming iteration processes so that reducing computa-

tional time can be achieved. Therefore, the conventional tech-
niques have limited performance in state estimation accuracy
and efficiency. The USGCN can handle the distribution system Fig. 7. The state estimation of voltage magnitudes and phase angles of node
state estimation efficiently. 15-30 of the 118-node distribution system at hour 12.
2) In Comparision With Data-Driven Methods: To investi-
gate the effectiveness of the proposed USGCN, the Full Con-
nected Network (FCN), Convolutional neural network (CNN),
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) [28], and Spatiotemporal
graph convolutional network (SGCN) are employed as the base-
line data-driven methods. The FCN includes five fully connected
network layers with 1000, 2000, 1000, 500, and 118 neurons in
each layer. The GCN consists of two convolutional graph layers,
where the adjacency matrix with self-loops formed from the
distribution system topology. The CNN approach includes three
2-d convolutional layers where each kernel size of the CNN
layer is 5, the channel sizes are 4, 8, and 2, respectively, and
three fully connected network layers with 1000, 500, and 118
neurons. The difference between USGCN and SGCN is that the
latter has only one graph without splicing the spatial graphs of
adjacent time steps, leading to spatial and temporal correlations
considered separately. Note that the distribution system states
are estimated based on the measurement at the current time step
and the previous two-time steps, such that here the sequence
length is set 22.
The state estimation results are listed in Table III. For the IEEE
118-node system, it shows that the proposed USGCN gains im-
proved 82.18%, 92.48%, 71.82%, and 75.20% in voltage mag-
nitude MAE in comparison to FCN, GCN, CNN, and SGCN,
respectively. Besides, USGCN also enhances voltage magnitude Fig. 8. (a) Correlations of RES. (b) Adjacent matrix of topology. (c) Parame-
RMSE at 82.23%, 32.34%, 74.58%, and 78.43% compared with ters in the unrolled spatiotemporal graph.
FCN, GCN, CNN, and SGCN, respectively. Moreover, for the
1747-node system, the USGCN reduces voltage phase angle
MAE at 74.62%, 96.58%, 95.24%, and 68.82% compared with deep learning methods. It illustrates that the proposed USGCN
FCN, GCN, CNN, and SGCN, respectively. This is because model performs better in reducing state estimation errors.
the USGCN can extract the spatiotemporal correlation features Furthermore, to inventively deliver the correlations learned by
in the measurements to facilitate the state estimation and thus the USGCN, the parameter in self-adaptive unrolled spatiotem-
achieve a better accurate result. The state estimation of voltage poral graph is depicted. Each element in this graph is calculated
magnitudes and phase angles in nodes 5-30 of the 118-node by the inner product of the corresponding node embeddings.
system are depicted in Fig. 7. Curves shows that the voltage Fig. 8(a) is the correlations of RES. Fig. 8(b) denotes the adjacent
magnitudes and phase angles estimated by the proposed USGCN matrix of topology. Fig. 8(c) represents the correlations learned
are more consistent with the real value than other the baseline by self-adaptive unrolled spatiotemporal graph. In comparison

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WU et al.: UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK FOR (DSSE) AND FORECASTING
Fig. 9. The state estimation for a different number of CNN layers in USGCN.
TABLE IV
THE RESULTS WITH DIFFERENT COLORED NOISE IN 118-NODE SYSTEM
with the heatmaps in (a) and (b), (c) presents more complex
correlations in unrolled spatiotemporal graph model between
nodes across time steps. This indicates that the correlation coef-
ficient matrix and the adjacent matrix of topology cannot fully
represent the complex correlations between nodes. However,
the proposed node embedding can capture the correlations from
the measurements data automatically. By this way, the state
estimation accuracy can be improved.
Since the number of the convolutional layers affects the state
estimation results, a different number of CNN layers are set to
verify their effect on the performance of the USGCN. Fig. 9
depicts the MAE and MAPE of state estimation for USGCN
with different numbers of CNN layers. The biases between the
training data and the testing data increase with the increase of
the CNN layers. This indicates that the overfitting rises with
eh increasing number of CNN. Besides, the three CNN layers
achieve the lowest MAE and MAPE so that three CNN layers
are chosen in the proposed model.
3) The Performance of USGCN With Colored Noise: To in-
vestigate the performance of the USGCN with colored noise
due to non-gaussian measurement error is not rare [23], the
pink, blue, brown, and purple noise with the deviation of ±1%
are also set as the cases. The corresponding results are listed in
Table IV. In In comparison with the results in Table III, the results
show that the USGCN model can also achieve high accuracy
with different colored noise in state estimation. This is because
the self-adaptive unrolled graph model can learn the complex
features from the measurements. Therefore, the proposed model
can also adapt to non-gaussian noise.
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305
TABLE V
THE STATE FORECASTING EVALUATION INDEX OF USGCN COMPARED WITH
TRADICTIONAL METHODS WITH AND WITHOUT CORRELATIONS
B. The Performance of USGCN in State Forecasting
To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed USGCN, the
FCN, CNN, GCN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) [37],
CNN-LSTM [38], and SGCN are employed as the baseline
models. The parameters of FCN, CNN, GCN are the same
as the above. The LSTM approach includes three layers. The
CNN-LSTM approach combines CNN and LSTM. Note that
state forecasting refers to the single-step following the last
observed time step so that sequence length setting is 21.
It is listed in Table V that the MAE, MAPE, and RMSE of volt-
age magnitudes and phase angles predicted by the proposed US-
GCN in the 118-node distribution system are lower than that of
the baseline methods. This indicates that the proposed USGCN
model is better than other deep learning methods. Quantitatively,
compared to the FCN, GCN, CNN, LSTM, CNN-LSTM, and
SGCN methods, the MAE of predicted voltage magnitudes from
USGCN is reduced by 11.7%, 27.3%, 56.9%, 77.8%, 92.2%, and
41.28%, respectively. Besides, the USGCN also outperforms the
MAPE of the voltage phase angle of these baseline methods by
51.8%, 59.3%, 51.6%, 76.4%, 82.8%, and 70.59%, respectively.
The prediction results of voltage magnitudes and phase angles of
node 55 are shown in Fig. 10. It shows that compared with other
methods, the state variables estimated by USGCN follow more
closely with the real value than the baseline methods. Especially,
LSTM and CNN-LSTM can only capture the temporal trend of
the system states, while the accuracy is relatively low. Besides,
the SGCN captures the spatial and temporal correlations sep-
arately, leading to low accurate state forecasting results. This
demonstrates the excellent performance of the USGCN in terms
of prediction effectiveness, which is because the spatiotemporal
correlation is fully captured by the unrolled spatiotemporal
graph model to achieve enhanced accuracy. Furthermore, the
predicted voltage from node 14 to node 30 at a 12-hour slot is
also described in Fig. 11. This indicates that USGCN can give a
more accurate estimated value than baseline methods. It is due
to the spatiotemporal correlations captured adaptively by the
proposed model. Therefore, the proposed USGCN can handle
the ahead-of-time DSSE effectively.
C. The Performance of USGCN in Large-Scale Distribution
System
To investigate the performance of the USGCN in a large-
scale distribution system, a 1746-node distribution system is
employed with 18 locations deployed with RES units. Since
such a system scale is too large to be learned by FCN and GCN
306
Fig. 10. The forecasting results of voltage magnitudes and phase angles of
node 55 in the 118-node distribution system.
Fig. 11. The forecasting results of voltage magnitudes and phase angles of
node 14-30 of the 118-node distribution system at hour 12.
methods, and LSTM represents a relatively bad MAE and MAPE
in the 118-node system, the CNN is maintained to be the baseline
method. The average prediction results of USGCN and the
baseline methods are shown in Table VI. It shows that the MAE,
MAPE, and RMSE of voltage magnitudes predicted by USGCN
outperform CNN by the percentages of 86.26%, 86.08%, and
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023
TABLE VI
THE USGCN EVALUATION RESULTS IN 1746-NODE SYSTEM
Fig. 12. The prediction results of voltage magnitudes and phase angles for bus
500 of the 1746-node distribution system.
63.35%, respectively. Besides, the MAE, MAPE, and RMSE
of voltage phase angles forecasted by the USGCN also out-
perform SGCN by 76.92%, 53.87%, and 51.64%, respectively.
This demonstrates that the proposed USGCN outperforms other
data-driven methods for large-scale distribution system state
estimation in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
The predicted voltage magnitudes and phase angles of node
500 of the 1746-node distribution system are depicted in Fig. 12.
It also shows that the bias of the predicted value with the real
value produced by baseline methods is more significant than
that generated by the USGCN model. It reflects the consistency
of the predicted state variables and the real values with highly
acceptable accuracy in a large-scale system. Therefore, the pro-
posed USGCN can fully handle the large-scale DSSE in terms
of effectiveness and efficiency.
VI. CONCLUSION
A novel USGCN model is proposed to timely estimate and
forecast distribution system states with high-penetrated renew-
able power energy that exhibits complex spatiotemporal correla-
tions. Compared with the traditional methods, at least a 16.42%
improvement in the accuracy of estimated states can be achieved
without and with correlations. This is because the innovative
unrolled spatiotemporal graph model can capture the complex
spatial correlations among measurements to achieve enhanced
effectiveness. Besides, the USGCN also has a much shorter
computation time than traditional DDSE methods. Furthermore,
the USGCN also outperforms the state-of-art deep learning
WU et al.: UNROLLED SPATIOTEMPORAL GRAPH CONVOLUTIONAL NETWORK FOR (DSSE) AND FORECASTING
methods with more accurate ahead-of-time forecasting states
due to longtime spatiotemporal correlations perceived by the
multiple stacked of the USG model. The results show the tremen-
dous potential foreground of the USGCN in spatiotemporal state
estimation of power system applications.
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Huayi Wu (Student Member, IEEE) received the
B.Eng. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering
from the South China University of Technology,
Guangzhou, China, in 2016 and 2019, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong,
in 2022. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow work-
ing under Prof. Zhao Xu with the Department of
Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University. Her research interests include artificial
intelligence application in power engineering and
power system optimal operation with renewables.
308
Zhao Xu (Senior Member, IEEE) received the B.Eng.
degree from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China,
in 1996, the M.Eng., degree from the National Uni-
versity of Singapore, Singapore, and the Ph.D. de-
gree in electrical engineering from The University of
Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia, in 2006. He
was an Assistant and then Associate Professor with
the Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical
University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark,
during 2006–2010. Since 2010, he has been with
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong,
where he is currently a Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Leader of Smart Grid Research Area. He is also a Foreign Associate
Staff of Centre for Electric Technology, Technical University of Denmark.
His research interests include smart grid, renewable energy and applications
of AI and Big Data analytics. He has extensive research project experiences
involving collaborations with academia, industrial and business sectors. He was
the recipient of the several awards for research excellence including 2017 State
Award in Nature Science from MOE, PR China. He is currently the Chairman
of IEEE Hong Kong Joint Chapter of PES/IELS/IAS/PELS. He also holds
editorships for several top journals e.g. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SUSTAINABLE ENERGY, VOL. 14, NO. 1, JANUARY 2023
Minghao Wang (Member, IEEE) received the
B.Eng.(with Hons.) degree in electrical and electronic
engineering from the Huazhong University of Science
and Technology, Wuhan, China, and the University
of Birmingham, Birmingham, U.K. in 2012, and the
M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and electronic
engineering from The University of Hong Kong,
Hong Kong, in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Since
2018, he has been with the Department of Electri-
cal Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hong Kong. He is currently a Research Assistant
Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University. His research interests include power systems and power
electronics.