A bilevel approach to transmission switching

With the development of smart grid and the increasing penetration of intermittent generation such as wind and solar, transmission network must be operated more effectively and flexible. Transmission switching has been explored in some literature as an effective mean to reduce dispatch cost. In this paper, based on dc optimal power flow we formulate this problem as a bilevel programming problem. The goal of the outer optimization is to minimize the number of switching actions and the goal of inner optimization is to minimize system cost over a static transmission network determined by the outer optimization. A 5-bus test system is used to evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method.