Optimal Transmission Switching: Improving Solver Performance Using Heuristics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hinneck, Anton, Pozo, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Hinneck, Anton
Pozo, David
author_facet Hinneck, Anton
Pozo, David
contents The optimal transmission switching problem (OTSP) is an established problem of changing a power grid's topology to obtain an improved operation by controlling the switching status of transmission lines. This problem was proven to be NP-hard. Proposed solution techniques based on mixed-integer formulations can guarantee globally optimal solutions but are potentially intractable in realistic power grids. Heuristics methods cannot guarantee global optimality but can provide tractable solution approaches. This paper proposes solving the OTSP using exact formulations alongside parallel heuristics that generate good candidate solutions to speed up conventional branch-and-bound algorithms. The innovative aspect of this work is a new asynchronous parallel algorithmic architecture. A solver instance solving the full OTSP formulation is run in parallel to another process that asynchronously generates solutions to be injected into the full OTSP solution procedure during run time. Our method is tested on 14 instances of the pglib-opf library: The largest problem consisting of 13659 buses and 20467 branches. Our results show a good performance for large problem instances, with consistent improvements over off-the-shelf solver performance. We find that the method scales well with an increase in parallel processors.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2106_12331
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Transmission Switching: Improving Solver Performance Using Heuristics
Hinneck, Anton
Pozo, David
Systems and Control
The optimal transmission switching problem (OTSP) is an established problem of changing a power grid's topology to obtain an improved operation by controlling the switching status of transmission lines. This problem was proven to be NP-hard. Proposed solution techniques based on mixed-integer formulations can guarantee globally optimal solutions but are potentially intractable in realistic power grids. Heuristics methods cannot guarantee global optimality but can provide tractable solution approaches. This paper proposes solving the OTSP using exact formulations alongside parallel heuristics that generate good candidate solutions to speed up conventional branch-and-bound algorithms. The innovative aspect of this work is a new asynchronous parallel algorithmic architecture. A solver instance solving the full OTSP formulation is run in parallel to another process that asynchronously generates solutions to be injected into the full OTSP solution procedure during run time. Our method is tested on 14 instances of the pglib-opf library: The largest problem consisting of 13659 buses and 20467 branches. Our results show a good performance for large problem instances, with consistent improvements over off-the-shelf solver performance. We find that the method scales well with an increase in parallel processors.
title Optimal Transmission Switching: Improving Solver Performance Using Heuristics
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12331