Farzaneh Pourahmadi

Victor Schmitt, Farzaneh Pourahmadi, Angela Flores-Quiroz et al.

Transmission expansion planning (TEP) plays a critical role in ensuring power system reliability and facilitating the integration of renewable energy resources. However, this process requires planners to constantly deal with significant uncertainty. While multistage stochastic TEP models provide a robust framework for identifying investment plans under uncertainty, the rapid growth in problem size hinders their computational tractability. To address this challenge, this paper develops a hybrid machine learning-optimisation framework for stochastic TEP. The proposed approach uses investment decisions and uncertainty scenarios as input features to train surrogate neural networks, which are then reformulated as mixed-integer linear constraints and embedded within an optimisation model. The surrogate model approximates expected operational costs to inform TEP decisions, reducing the burden arising from large operational problems. Case study applications on IEEE test systems demonstrate that, after training, the proposed approach achieves near-optimal investment costs while reducing total computational time by up to a factor of around 13 compared to a single full-optimisation stochastic formulation. This enables performing extensive multi-scenario analysis and stress testing that would otherwise be computationally prohibitive at scale.

Farzaneh Pourahmadi, Jalal Kazempour

The system operators usually need to solve large-scale unit commitment problems within limited time frame for computation. This paper provides a pragmatic solution, showing how by learning and predicting the on/off commitment decisions of conventional units, there is a potential for system operators to warm start their solver and speed up their computation significantly. For the prediction, we train linear and kernelized support vector machine classifiers, providing an out-of-sample performance guarantee if properly regularized, converting to distributionally robust classifiers. For the unit commitment problem, we solve a mixed-integer second-order cone problem. Our results based on the IEEE 6- and 118-bus test systems show that the kernelized SVM with proper regularization outperforms other classifiers, reducing the computational time by a factor of 1.7. In addition, if there is a tight computational limit, while the unit commitment problem without warm start is far away from the optimal solution, its warmly-started version can be solved to (near) optimality within the time limit.