{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/optimizing-power-grid-topologies-with","title":"Optimizing Power Grid Topologies with Reinforcement Learning: A Survey of Methods and Challenges","arxiv_id":"2504.08210","date":"2025-04-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Erica van der Sar","Alessandro Zocca","Sandjai Bhulai"],"abstract":"Power grid operation is becoming increasingly complex due to the rising integration of renewable energy sources and the need for more adaptive control strategies. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to power network control (PNC), offering the potential to enhance decision-making in dynamic and uncertain environments. The Learning To Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competitions have played a key role in accelerating research by providing standardized benchmarks and problem formulations, leading to rapid advancements in RL-based methods. This survey provides a comprehensive and structured overview of RL applications for power grid topology optimization, categorizing existing techniques, highlighting key design choices, and identifying gaps in current research. Additionally, we present a comparative numerical study evaluating the impact of commonly applied RL-based methods, offering insights into their practical effectiveness. By consolidating existing research and outlining open challenges, this survey aims to provide a foundation for future advancements in RL-driven power grid optimization.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08210v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.08210v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"optimizing-power-grid-topologies-with","repo_url":"https://github.com/ericavandersar/rl4pnc-survey","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"survey","task_name":"Survey"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2504.08210","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}