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A Cycle-Based Formulation and Valid Inequalities for DC Power Transmission Problems with Switching
It is well-known that optimizing network topology by switching on and off
transmission lines improves the efficiency of power delivery in electrical
networks. In fact, the USA Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Section 1223) states that
the U.S. should "encourage, as appropriate, the deployment of advanced
transmission technologies" including "optimized transmission line
configurations". As such, many authors have studied the problem of determining
an optimal set of transmission lines to switch off to minimize the cost of
meeting a given power demand under the direct current (DC) model of power flow.
This problem is known in the literature as the Direct-Current Optimal
Transmission Switching Problem (DC-OTS). Most research on DC-OTS has focused on
heuristic algorithms for generating quality solutions or on the application of
DC-OTS to crucial operational and strategic problems such as contingency
correction, real-time dispatch, and transmission expansion. The mathematical
theory of the DC-OTS problem is less well-developed. In this work, we formally
establish that DC-OTS is NP-Hard, even if the power network is a
series-parallel graph with at most one load/demand pair. Inspired by Kirchoff's
Voltage Law, we give a cycle-based formulation for DC-OTS, and we use the new
formulation to build a cycle-induced relaxation. We characterize the convex
hull of the cycle-induced relaxation, and the characterization provides strong
valid inequalities that can be used in a cutting-plane approach to solve the
DC-OTS. We give details of a practical implementation, and we show promising
computational results on standard benchmark instances
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