Transfer learning-based methodologies for Dynamic Thermal Rating of transmission lines

Dynamic Thermal Rating (DTR) enhances grid flexibility by adapting line capabilities to weather conditions. For this purpose, DTR-based technologies require reliable and continuous measurement of the conductor temperature along the line route, which could hinder their wide-scale deployment due to the prohibitively high number of required sensors. Existing machine learning-based DTR methods infer conductor temperature from weather variables avoiding using complex and expensive measurement techniques, but their estimation accuracy greatly relies on the availability of a comprehensive set of measured data. To face these issues, this paper proposes the usage of transfer learning, a data-driven technique allowing the reduction of the number of sensors by transferring knowledge from a single calibrated source sensor to many target sensors. To the best of the author's knowledge, at the time of writing, the proposed approach is the first application of Transfer Learning in the domain of DTR which is validated on real transmission lines data. Experimental results from several real transmission lines equipped with self-organizing sensors-based DTR architecture show that transfer learning enhances the conductor temperature estimation reliability and accuracy of machine learning-based DTR techniques, suggesting the potential for practical applications, and reducing costs without losing accuracy for practitioners and system operators.