GridSFM: A Foundation Model for Solving AC Optimal Power Flow

We introduce GridSFM, a framework that combines a pretrained foundation model across grid topologies with physics-informed fine-tuning for solving AC Optimal Power Flow (AC-OPF) at scale. It is a 15 million parameter physics-inspired graph neural network pretrained across 54 topologies of 500 to 4,000 buses. Our model attains a 2.45% zero-shot generation cost error on a 10,000 bus case held-out operating conditions with no degradation as system size grows. Building on this, we pair the pretrained backbone with a physics-informed fine-tuning design based on Newton’s method for power flow. With only 100 solved instances, GridSFM adapts to unseen grids up to 10,000 buses. We show it outperforms single topology, dedicated neural network models that are trained on more data, both in terms of cost and solver iterations when deployed as warm starting points. In designing this foundation model, we overcome the fact that the feasible set for AC-OPF can be disconnected. This is an obstruction that prevents any continuous neural network from approximating the solution map. To do so, we lift the problem and relax its constraints with logarithmically penalized slacks. We prove that the resulting elastic feasible set is contractible, that the AC-OPF minimizers remain minimizers of the elastic problem above an explicit penalty threshold, and that projecting an approximate solution back onto the AC-OPF feasible set is well posed. We release all models, data, and code so that the community can build on a shared starting point for AC-OPF.