abstract: The standard optimal power flow (OPF) problem is an economic dispatch (ED) problem combined with transmission constraints, which are based on a static topology. However, topology control (TC) has been proposed in the past as a corrective mechanism to relieve overloads and voltage violations. Even though the benefits of TC are presented by several research works in the past, the computational complexity associated with TC has been a major deterrent to its implementation. The proposed work develops heuristics for TC and investigates its potential to improve the computational time for TC for various applications. The objective is to develop computationally light methods to harness the flexibility of the grid to derive maximum benefits to the system in terms of reliability. One of the goals of this research is to develop a tool that will be capable of providing TC actions in a minimal time-frame, which can be readily adopted by the industry for real-time corrective applications. A DC based heuristic, i.e., a greedy algorithm, is developed and applied to improve the computational time for the TC problem while still maintaining the ability to find quality solutions. In the greedy algorithm, an expression is derived, which indicates the impact on the objective for a marginal change in the state of a transmission line. This expression is used to generate a priority list with potential candidate lines for switching, which may provide huge improvements to the system. The advantage of this method is that it is a fast heuristic as compared to using mixed integer programming (MIP) approach. Alternatively, AC based heuristics are developed for TC problem and tested on actual data from PJM, ERCOT and TVA. AC based N-1 contingency analysis is performed to identify the contingencies that cause network violations. Simple proximity based heuristics are developed and the fast decoupled power flow is solved iteratively to identify the top five TC actions, which provide reduction in violations. Time domain simulations are performed to ensure that the TC actions do not cause system instability. Simulation results show significant reductions in violations in the system by the application of the TC heuristics. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2016

abstract: The flexibility in power system networks is not fully modeled in existing real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) and real-time security-constrained economic dispatch (RT SCED) applications. Thus, corrective transmission switching (CTS) is proposed in this dissertation to enable RTCA and RT SCED to take advantage of the flexibility in the transmission system in a practical way. RTCA is first conducted to identify critical contingencies that may cause violations. Then, for each critical contingency, CTS is performed to determine the beneficial switching actions that can reduce post-contingency violations. To reduce computational burden, fast heuristic algorithms are proposed to generate candidate switching lists. Numerical simulations performed on three large-scale realistic power systems (TVA, ERCOT, and PJM) demonstrate that CTS can significantly reduce post-contingency violations. Parallel computing can further reduce the solution time. RT SCED is to eliminate the actual overloads and potential post-contingency overloads identified by RTCA. Procedure-A, which is consistent with existing industry practices, is proposed to connect RTCA and RT SCED. As CTS can reduce post-contingency violations, higher branch limits, referred to as pseudo limits, may be available for some contingency-case network constraints. Thus, Procedure-B is proposed to take advantage of the reliability benefits provided by CTS. With the proposed Procedure-B, CTS can be modeled in RT SCED implicitly through the proposed pseudo limits for contingency-case network constraints, which requires no change to existing RT SCED tools. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed Procedure-A can effectively eliminate the flow violations reported by RTCA and that the proposed Procedure-B can reduce most of the congestion cost with consideration of CTS. The system status may be inaccurately estimated due to false data injection (FDI) cyber-attacks, which may mislead operators to adjust the system improperly and cause network violations. Thus, a two-stage FDI detection (FDID) approach, along with several metrics and an alert system, is proposed in this dissertation to detect FDI attacks. The first stage is to determine whether the system is under attack and the second stage would identify the target branch. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage FDID approach. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2017