Decentralized Transmission Line Switching for Congestion Management of Interconnected Power Systems

Independent system operators (ISOs) are responsible for the secure and economic operation of the power systems. Accordingly, ISOs should solve an optimal power flow to minimize the operating cost of a system while meeting the system's security constraints. However, transmission congestion could drastically limit more economical generating units from being dispatched in the power system operation. In this paper, a decentralized transmission switching is introduced in the operation of multi-area power systems to manage the congestion both on regional transmission lines and tie lines while considering credible contingencies. Our proposed methodology relies on a decentralized optimization methodology. Thus, regional control centers in areas would be able to locally manage the congestion within their regional networks as well as tie lines connecting them to their neighboring areas. Several testing systems are studied in this paper to test the effectiveness of the proposed method.