2026 Zhang Distribution Network Risk Anomaly Identification

Reliable operation of modern distribution networks requires timely identification of operational risks and anomalous events under pervasive uncertainty. In practice, operators must identify risks that are inherent in stochastic yet in-distribution conditions and anomalies that correspond to out-of-distribution behaviors such as unusual load patterns, extreme weather, or cyber-physical attacks. This paper addresses this joint risk and anomaly identification problem for optimal distribution network operation and proposes a deep reinforcement learning framework that is explicitly uncertainty aware. We integrate distributional and Bayesian deep reinforcement learning to realize a second-order uncertainty quantification scheme that decomposes total uncertainty into aleatoric and epistemic components, which are respectively used to characterize inherent risk and out-of-distribution anomalies. The resulting epistemic estimates drive both exploration during training and out-of-distribution detection with fallback control during deployment, whereas aleatoric estimates are used to characterize intrinsic operational risk. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of our DRL agent and the effectiveness of the uncertainty quantification.