Optimal Power Flow with Substation Reconfiguration

Substation reconfiguration may reduce congestion and therefore reduce the cost of economic dispatch. In this paper we propose a novel method that can be applied to any substation configuration using a mixed-integer linear model. Our methodology generalizes substation reconfiguration to include both more traditional transmission switching and bus splitting. The problem is NP-hard but we show that using state-of-the-art tools we can reduce the computation time significantly. The method has been evaluated on several test cases, the IEEE 118-bus case being the largest. Optimal solutions were found within much smaller time frames than have been previously reported.