An Improved Transmission Switching Algorithm for Managing Post-(N-1) Contingency Violations in Electricity Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, efficient bi-level heuristic method for transmission switching that effectively reduces post-contingency violations and load shedding in power systems, outperforming existing approaches.

Contribution

The paper presents a new bi-level linear sensitivity-based heuristic for transmission switching that guarantees violation removal and minimizes load shedding without complex mixed-integer programming.

Findings

Effective violation removal in IEEE 39-bus system

Reduces load shedding compared to existing methods

Performs well even when other methods fail

Abstract

This letter is a proof of concept for an improved transmission switching (TS) performance by moving the search space to load shed buses. Research from the past shows that changing transmission system topology changes the power flows and removes post contingency violations. Hence, TS can reduce the amount of load shed after an N-1 contingency. One of the major challenges is to find the best TS candidate in a suitable time. In this letter, the best TS candidate is determined by using a novel heuristic bi-level method based on linear sensitivity. The proposed bi-level method is easy to implement in the real world, guarantees removal of post contingency violations, and ranks the best TS candidates based on minimum load shedding possible. Moreover, the proposed method is computationally efficient since it does not involve mixed integer programming. The bi-level method is implemented by modifying the topology of transmission system after the N-1 contingency in the IEEE 39-bus test system and results show that TS with generation re-dispatch is the best solution for load shed recovery to prevent cascading failures. Moreover, the bi-level method performs even for the case when the existing methods in literature fail to completely remove post contingency violations.