Sensor-Aware Joint Data Fusion and State Estimation under Sparse Multi-rate Distribution Grid Sensing

This letter poses state estimation (SE) as an in-context tabular prediction (ICTP) problem. The key idea is a tabular arrangement in which historical measurement vectors and corresponding state estimates serve as the context, and a new measurement vector forms the query for which we predict a state vector. We propose to use tabular foundation models (TFMs), pretrained on synthetic data, whose weights are never updated, so power system data is needed only as context. With frozen TFM weights we estimate the state of 14-, 30-, 33-, 70-, and 118-bus transmission and distribution networks, and do so where weighted least squares (WLS) fails or degrades, under low observability and with bad data. ICTP errors are 11 to 57$\times$ below the per-bus average of the context at full metering, and 1.3 to 4.0$\times$ below it with only 5% of measurements available. With measurements at six buses biased by 8$σ$, the ICTP angle error rises 1.8 to 5.0$\times$ over its bias-free value against 2.5 to 12.7$\times$ for WLS with bad-data detection. Without retraining, ICTP has lower voltage error than DSS$^2$ on both of its feeders, and lower than a retrained TAPINE on two of three reconfiguration sets.

This paper proposes a joint multi-objective optimization framework for strategic sensor placement in power systems to enhance attack detection. A novel physics-informed graph transformer network (PIGTN)-based detection model is proposed. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) jointly optimizes sensor locations and the PIGTN's detection performance, while considering practical constraints. The combinatorial space of feasible sensor placements is explored using NSGA-II, while concurrently training the proposed detector in a closed-loop setting. Compared to baseline sensor placement methods, the proposed framework consistently demonstrates robustness under sensor failures and improvements in detection performance in seven benchmark cases, including the 14, 30, IEEE-30, 39, 57, 118 and the 200 bus systems. By incorporating AC power flow constraints, the proposed PIGTN-based detection model generalizes well to unseen attacks and outperforms other graph network-based variants (topology-aware models), achieving improvements up to 37% in accuracy and 73% in detection rate, with a mean false alarms rate of 0.3%. In addition, optimized sensor layouts significantly improve the performance of power system state estimation, achieving a 61%--98% reduction in the average state error.

Power Flow (PF), Optimal Power Flow (OPF), and State Estimation (SE) are fundamental problems in power system analysis, but solving them is computationally expensive. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been proposed as fast surrogates, yet existing solvers are trained for a single problem at a time, producing narrow models that must be rebuilt for each new task. We propose a more general approach: a single Heterogeneous Residual Gated Graph Convolutional Network that solves all three problems with one shared backbone. Rather than learning one mapping, the model learns a reusable representation of how the network behaves, from which PF, OPF, and SE can each be estimated. Trained jointly on the three problems across diverse topologies and loading conditions, and evaluated on the IEEE 14-bus and 118-bus systems, the shared model matches the accuracy of task-specific GNN solvers and stays robust on unseen loading levels and topologies. These results show that a single model can capture the basic operation of a power network and serve several analysis tasks at once, a first step toward a foundation model for power systems.