The ongoing transition to renewable energy supply comes with a restructuring of power grids, changing their effective interaction topologies, more and more strongly decentralizing them and substantially modifying their input, output, and response characteristics. All of these changes imply that power grids become increasingly affected by collective, nonlinear dynamic phenomena, structurally and dynamically more distributed and less predictable in space and time, more heterogeneous in its building blocks, and as a consequence less centrally controllable. Here cornerstone aspects of data-driven and mathematical modeling of collective dynamical phenomena emerging in real and model power grid networks by combining theories from nonlinear dynamics, stochastic processes and statistical physics, anomalous statistics, optimization, and graph theory are reviewed. The mathematical background required for adequate modeling and analysis approaches is introduced, an overview of power system models is given, and a range of collective dynamical phenomena are focused on, including synchronization and phase locking, flow (re)routing, Braess’s paradox, geometric frustration, and spreading and localization of perturbations and cascading failures, as well as the nonequilibrium dynamics of power grids, where fluctuations play a pivotal role.

The probability density function of stochastic differential equations is governed by the Fokker-Planck (FP) equation. A novel machine learning method is developed to solve the general FP equations based on deep neural networks. The proposed algorithm does not require any interpolation and coordinate transformation, which is different from the traditional numerical methods. The main novelty of this paper is that penalty factors are introduced to overcome the local optimization for the deep learning approach, and the corresponding setting rules are given. Meanwhile, we consider a normalization condition as a supervision condition to effectively avoid that the trial solution is zero. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate performances of the proposed algorithm, including one-, two-, and three-dimensional systems. All the results suggest that the deep learning is quite feasible and effective to calculate the FP equation. Furthermore, influences of the number of hidden layers, the penalty factors, and the optimization algorithm are discussed in detail. These results indicate that the performances of the machine learning technique can be improved through constructing the neural networks appropriately.

We introduce the pyunicorn (Pythonic unified complex network and recurrence analysis toolbox) open source software package for applying and combining modern methods of data analysis and modeling from complex network theory and nonlinear time series analysis. pyunicorn is a fully object-oriented and easily parallelizable package written in the language Python. It allows for the construction of functional networks such as climate networks in climatology or functional brain networks in neuroscience representing the structure of statistical interrelationships in large data sets of time series and, subsequently, investigating this structure using advanced methods of complex network theory such as measures and models for spatial networks, networks of interacting networks, node-weighted statistics, or network surrogates. Additionally, pyunicorn provides insights into the nonlinear dynamics of complex systems as recorded in uni- and multivariate time series from a non-traditional perspective by means of recurrence quantification analysis, recurrence networks, visibility graphs, and construction of surrogate time series. The range of possible applications of the library is outlined, drawing on several examples mainly from the field of climatology.

We study the consensus problem in directed static networks with arbitrary finite communication delays and consider both linear and nonlinear coupling. For the considered networked system, only locally delayed information is available for each node and also the information flow is directed. We find that consensus can be realized whatever the communications delays are. In fact, we do not even need to know the explicit values of the communication delays. One well-informed leader is proved to be enough for the regulation of all nodes’ final states, even when the external signal is very weak. Numerical simulations for opinion formation in small-world and scale-free networks are given to demonstrate the potentials of our analytic results.

Autonomous systems possess the features of inferring their own state, understanding their surroundings, and performing autonomous navigation. With the applications of learning systems, like deep learning and reinforcement learning, the visual-based self-state estimation, environment perception, and navigation capabilities of autonomous systems have been efficiently addressed, and many new learning-based algorithms have surfaced with respect to autonomous visual perception and navigation. In this review, we focus on the applications of learning-based monocular approaches in ego-motion perception, environment perception, and navigation in autonomous systems, which is different from previous reviews that discussed traditional methods. First, we delineate the shortcomings of existing classical visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) solutions, which demonstrate the necessity to integrate deep learning techniques. Second, we review the visual-based environmental perception and understanding methods based on deep learning, including deep learning-based monocular depth estimation, monocular ego-motion prediction, image enhancement, object detection, semantic segmentation, and their combinations with traditional vSLAM frameworks. Then, we focus on the visual navigation based on learning systems, mainly including reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning. Finally, we examine several challenges and promising directions discussed and concluded in related research of learning systems in the era of computer science and robotics.