Economic and corrective applications of tractable transmission topology control

Transmission topology control (TC) is currently employed by power system operators for reliability, e.g., in special protection schemes, rather than for economic reasons. The standard economic generation dispatch (ED) minimizes generation costs subject to a fixed transmission network topology. Although the co-optimization of network topology and generation resources results in significant congestion cost avoidance, it requires the solution of a mixed integer program (MIP), which is intractable for even moderate size systems. Our previous work developed near-optimal and yet tractable TC policies that employ sensitivity information readily available from the standard ED solution. This paper reports on advances to tractable TC, including relaxations to the MIP formulation and TC employed in corrective scenarios. Simulation results on the IEEE 118-bus test system found that, besides giving near optimal generation cost savings, our algorithm is very effective in providing corrective switching actions with minimal computational effort.