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Independent system operators (ISOs) are responsible for the secure and economic operation of the power systems. Accordingly, ISOs should solve an optimal power flow to minimize the operating cost of a system while meeting the system's security constraints. However, transmission congestion could drastically limit more economical generating units from being dispatched in the power system operation. In this paper, a decentralized transmission switching is introduced in the operation of multi-area power systems to manage the congestion both on regional transmission lines and tie lines while considering credible contingencies. Our proposed methodology relies on a decentralized optimization methodology. Thus, regional control centers in areas would be able to locally manage the congestion within their regional networks as well as tie lines connecting them to their neighboring areas. Several testing systems are studied in this paper to test the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union is targeting a 20% share of energy from renewable resources by 2020, and this increase is in turn expected to lead to operational challenges that will require various congestion management actions by system operators. In this paper, we deal with topology control of the transmission network as a congestion management resource and evaluate the impacts of topology control on the European electricity network. To do this, we co-optimize unit commitment and transmission switching over 24 h, and we use a decomposition scheme to tackle the resulting large-scale problem. Our analysis is conducted on different scenarios of load and renewable power generation. We find that topology control results in significant cost savings within Europe which tend to be inversely related to net load. The robustness of our results is supported by an extensive sensitivity analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]