Virtual-Voltage Partition-Based Approach to Optimal Transmission Switching

• Published in: IEEE transactions on control systems technology Vol. 29; no. 3; pp. 1246 - 1256
• Main Authors: Chang, Chin-Yao, Martinez, Sonia, Cortes, Jorge
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Electric potential; Graph partitions; Mixed integer; mixed-integer programming; Network topologies; Network topology; optimal power flow (OPF); optimal transmission switching (OTS); Optimization; Partitioning algorithms; Partitions; Power flow; power networks; Power transmission lines; Programming; Semidefinite programming; semidefinite programming (SDP); Switches; Switching; Upper bound; Upper bounds; Voltage
• ISSN: 1063-6536; 1558-0865
• DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2020.3004704

This article deals with optimal transmission switching (OTS) problems involving binary decisions about network topology and nonconvex power flow constraints. We adopt a semidefinite programming formulation for the optimal power flow (OPF) problem that, however, remains nonconvex due to the presence of discrete variables and bilinear products between the decision variables. To tackle the latter, we introduce a physically inspired, virtual-voltage approximation that leads to provable lower and upper bounds on the solution of the original problem. To deal with the exponential complexity caused by the discrete variables, we introduce a graph partition-based algorithm that breaks the problem into several parallel mixed-integer subproblems of smaller size. Simulations on the IEEE bus test cases demonstrate the high degree of accuracy and affordable computational requirements of our approach.