A K-Nearest Neighbor Heuristic for Real-Time DC Optimal Transmission Switching

Understand

While transmission switching is known to reduce power generation costs, the difficulty of solving even DC optimal transmission switching (DCOTS) has prevented optimal transmission switching from becoming commonplace in real-time power systems operation.

• In this paper, we present a k-nearest neighbors (KNN) heuristic for DCOTS which relies on the insight that, for routine operations on a fixed network, the DCOTS solutions for similar load profiles and generation cost profiles will likely turn off similar sets of lines.
• We take a data-driven approach and assume that we have DCOTS solutions for many historical instances, which is realistic given that the problem is solved every 5 minutes in practice.
• Given a new instance, we find a set of "close" instances from the past and return the best of their solutions for the new instance.