Quantum computing based hybrid deep learning for fault diagnosis in electrical power systems

Quantum computing (QC) and deep learning have shown promise of supporting transformative advances and have recently gained popularity in a wide range of areas. This paper proposes a hybrid QC-based deep learning framework for fault diagnosis of electrical power systems that combine the feature extraction capabilities of conditional restricted Boltzmann machine with an efficient classification of deep networks. Computational challenges stemming from the complexities of such deep learning models are overcome by QC-based training methodologies that effectively leverage the complementary strengths of quantum assisted learning and classical training techniques. The proposed hybrid QC-based deep learning framework is tested on a simulated electrical power system with 30 buses and wide variations of substation and transmission line faults, to demonstrate the framework’s applicability, efficiency, and generalization capabilities. High computational efficiency is enjoyed by the proposed hybrid approach in terms of computational effort required and quality of diagnosis performance over classical training methods. In addition, superior and reliable fault diagnosis performance with faster response time is achieved over state-of-the-art pattern recognition methods based on artificial neural networks (ANN) and decision trees (DT).