How AEP Brings AI Into Its PLEXOS® Modeling Workflows

American Electric Power (AEP) supports long-term resource planning across five vertically integrated utilities, serving 5.6 million customers and operating the largest transmission network in the United States.

As demand growth, renewable integration, and system complexity increase, AEP's planning teams are asked to evaluate more scenarios, process larger datasets, and communicate insights faster than ever before. Traditional modeling workflows built around manual processes and disconnected reporting are becoming increasingly difficult to scale.

To help meet those demands, AEP’s Resource Planning organization incorporates PLEXOS® Intelligence into its modeling workflow. Built specifically for PLEXOS® users, the platform helps analysts accelerate diagnostics, simplify troubleshooting, and better understand model behavior directly within the PLEXOS® environment.

Planning in a Fast-Moving Energy Market

As AEP's models become larger and more interconnected, planning workflows become increasingly difficult to manage. Analysts balance growing scenario complexity, larger volumes of inputs and outputs, and tighter timelines across resource planning activities.

Many workflows still require substantial manual effort. Analysts spend their time troubleshooting infeasibilities, validating assumptions, navigating documentation, and interpreting outputs spread across multiple interfaces and reporting tools.

In trying to address these challenges, AEP’s planning analysts found that generic AI tools often lack the specialized understanding needed for PLEXOS® workflows. AEP's planning process relies heavily on PLEXOS®-specific logic, APIs, constraints, and utility planning processes, making context and platform knowledge essential for effective troubleshooting and interpretation.

"Generic AI tools simply don't have the depth of PLEXOS® knowledge that PLEXOS® Intelligence provides." –   Abdu Al Shair, Resource Planning Analyst Principal

As planning models grow more detailed, teams need a faster and more intuitive way to diagnose issues, interpret outputs, and communicate planning insights across the organization.

Intelligence Built for PLEXOS® Workflows

To modernize its workflow, AEP’s resource planning team uses PLEXOS® Intelligence alongside the PLEXOS® API to streamline diagnostics, accelerate troubleshooting, and improve visibility into simulation outputs.

AEP's planning team regularly uses APIs and scripting to automate portions of the modeling process, but identifying the correct commands, parameters, and configurations can still require navigating extensive documentation manually.

With PLEXOS® Intelligence, analysts ask questions directly inside the PLEXOS® environment and receive contextual guidance tied specifically to PLEXOS® APIs, modeling logic, and platform functionality.

The platform helps accelerate:

• Infeasibility diagnostics
• Constraint investigation
• Model validation
• Scenario review
• Output interpretation

PLEXOS® Intelligence also improves the team's ability to troubleshoot infeasibilities and understand why models fail to solve. Instead of manually tracing constraints across large datasets, analysts can more quickly inspect model behavior and narrow down potential root causes.

At the same time, the combination of PLEXOS® Intelligence and the PLEXOS® API helps AEP’s planning analysts move beyond static reporting workflows.

Rather than manually organizing outputs across spreadsheets and presentations, the team uses API-connected workflows to interact directly with PLEXOS® solution files and generate consolidated dashboards that connect reserve margins, market exposure, resource additions, reliability metrics, and scenario outcomes into a single, easier-to-understand view.

This creates a more connected process for troubleshooting, validation, scenario review, and stakeholder communication without compromising the rigor of the underlying modeling process.

From Complexity to Clarity

Since incorporating PLEXOS® Intelligence into their workflow, AEP’s resource planning team has experienced improvements in the speed and accessibility of their workflows.

Analysts now spend less time:

• Searching documentation
• Troubleshooting infeasibilities
• Manually investigating outputs
• Building reports
• Explaining results across multiple tools

Instead, teams focus more time on higher-value analytical work, including scenario interpretation, trade-off analysis, and strategic planning.

Combined with AEP’s existing PLEXOS® API-based automation workflows, PLEXOS® Intelligence helps improve transparency into model behavior. Rather than presenting isolated outputs, AEP communicates planning decisions through clearer narratives and integrated visualizations that connect assumptions, constraints, and outcomes together.

For stakeholders outside the modeling team, that visibility is critical. Executives and planners can better understand why the model selects certain resources, how reliability targets are achieved, and what trade-offs influence the results.

AEP also combines PLEXOS® Intelligence with internally developed Python and PLEXOS® API automation to streamline diagnostics, report, and scenario analysis.

The result is a workflow that is faster, clearer, and better equipped to support increasingly complex planning decisions.

Accelerating Energy Decision Intelligence 

As utilities face increasing system complexity and tighter planning timelines, the ability to move faster without sacrificing rigor becomes increasingly important.

For AEP’s Resource Planning organization, PLEXOS® Intelligence enhances analyst effectiveness by simplifying troubleshooting, accelerating diagnostics, and making model outputs easier to interpret and communicate.

Combined with the PLEXOS® API, it helps the organization move from fragmented workflows toward a more connected, decision-focused planning process. Looking ahead, the team at AEP sees opportunities to further streamline scenario analysis, portfolio comparison, and planning workflows using Energy Exemplar's growing portfolio of AI-enabled capabilities.

The experience of AEP’s planning analysts demonstrates how embedded intelligence inside trusted platforms, like PLEXOS®, can help utilities move towards a more connected, transparent, and decision-focused planning process that allows analysis to spend less time navigating complexity and more time evaluating planning decisions.