Security Regions as Guardrails for Grid Operation AI Agents: Toward Trustworthy Autonomous Decision-Making

As renewable generation, distributed energy resources, and virtual power plants become more active, power system operations are growing more variable and harder to interpret in real time. Grid Operation AI Agents can rapidly integrate heterogeneous information and generate candidate actions. However, an AI-generated action may appear reasonable yet still violate physical security constraints, making such recommendations difficult to trust without explicit verification.
This motivates combining AI agents with physical security boundaries. This paper proposes security regions as guardrails for Grid Operation AI Agents: the AI explores operating options and proposes actions, while the security region defines the physical boundary within which those actions can be trusted. Actions can then be accepted, revised, or rejected, providing a physically grounded, auditable basis for trustworthy AI-assisted grid operation.