PowerChain: Automating Distribution Grid Analysis with Agentic AI Workflows

Abstract: Due to the rapid pace of electrification and decarbonization, distribution grid (DG) operation and planning are becoming more complex, necessitating advanced computational analyses to ensure grid reliability and resilience. State-of-the-art DG analyses rely on disparate workflows of complex models, functions, and data pipelines, which require expert knowledge and are challenging to automate. Many small-scale utilities and cooperatives lack a large R&D workforce and therefore cannot use advanced analysis at scale. To address this gap, we develop a novel agentic AI system, PowerChain, to solve unseen DG analysis tasks via automated agentic orchestration and LLMs function-calling. Given a natural language query, PowerChain dynamically generates and executes an ordered sequence of domain-aware functions guided by the semantics of an expert-built power systems function pool and a select reference set of known, expert-generated workflow-query pairs. Our results show that PowerChain can produce expert-level workflows with both GPT-5 and open-source Qwen models on complex, unseen DG analysis tasks operating on real utility data.