Column Generation for Transmission Switching of Electricity Networks with Unit Commitment

This paper presents the problem of finding the minimum cost dispatch and commitment of power generation units in a transmission network with active switching.We use the term active switching to denote the use of switches to optimize network topology in an operational context. We propose a Dantzig-Wolfe reformulation and a novel column generation framework to solve the problem efficiently. Preliminary results are presented for the IEEE-118 bus network with 19 generator units. Active switching is shown to reduce total cost by up to 15 % for a particular 24-hour period. Furthermore, the need for generator startups is reduced by 1. Instances with limited switching, some of which are intractable for commercial solvers, are shown to solve to optimality in reasonable time.