Power Grid Decomposition Based on Vertex Cut Sets and Its Applications to Topology Control and Power Trading

Abstract

It is well known that the reserves/redundancies built into the transmission grid in order to address a variety of contingencies over a long planning horizon may, in the short run, cause economic dispatch inefficiency. Accordingly, power grid optimization by means of short term line switching has been proposed and is typically formulated as a mixed integer programming problem by treating the state of the transmission lines as a binary decision variable, i.e. in-service or out-of-service, in the optimal power flow problem. To handle the combinatorial explosion, a number of heuristic approaches to grid topology reconfiguration have been proposed in the literature. This paper extends our recent results on the iterative heuristics and proposes a fast grid decomposition algorithm based on vertex cut sets with the purpose of further reducing the computational cost. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possible relationship between vertex cut sets in transmission networks and power trading.

Paradigm and Paradox in Topology Control of Power Grids

“…While optimality for NP-hard problems is not obtained, our simulation results on a set of iterative heuristics nevertheless offer some justification that, with similar searching space, a greedy heuristic has a better chance in reducing generation cost and enforcing connectivity. Future work will be focused on further simplifying the problem by developing fast partition algorithms for the decomposition approach [18]. Adaptability of the decomposition with respect to various types (traditional & renewable) of generators will also be the subject of future work.…”