NESTA, The NICTA Energy System Test Case Archive

TLDR

Recent power‑systems research has expanded operations‑research applications, all of which rely on test cases, yet many classic test cases date back to the 1960s and were designed for AC power‑flow studies rather than optimization. The report surveys publicly available AC transmission system test cases to assess their suitability for power‑system optimization studies. The authors develop data‑driven models from publicly available data to add missing constraints such as line thermal limits and generator capability curves to the test cases. Many traditional test cases lack key operational constraints, and the extended test cases compiled into NESTA provide a comprehensive archive for evaluating power‑system optimization algorithms.

Abstract

In recent years the power systems research community has seen an explosion of work applying operations research techniques to challenging power network optimization problems. Regardless of the application under consideration, all of these works rely on power system test cases for evaluation and validation. However, many of the well established power system test cases were developed as far back as the 1960s with the aim of testing AC power flow algorithms. It is unclear if these power flow test cases are suitable for power system optimization studies. This report surveys all of the publicly available AC transmission system test cases, to the best of our knowledge, and assess their suitability for optimization tasks. It finds that many of the traditional test cases are missing key network operation constraints, such as line thermal limits and generator capability curves. To incorporate these missing constraints, data driven models are developed from a variety of publicly available data sources. The resulting extended test cases form a compressive archive, NESTA, for the evaluation and validation of power system optimization algorithms.