Proceedings of the PowerUp Conference

Transmission network reconfiguration is essential for congestion management, yet substation reconfiguration (bus splitting) is often overlooked due to its modeling complexity. This paper proposes a unified framework to jointly optimize line switching and bus splitting. To maintain computational tractabil- ity, we employ two complementary representations: a bus-branch representation that models bus splitting as a line outage and power transfer; and a more detailed bus-breaker representa- tion that captures flexibility from substation reconfigurations beyond the bus-branch representation. We demonstrate that the bus-branch optimal solutions effectively guide the modeling of branch-to-busbar assignment policies of the bus-breaker repre- sentation, further enhancing performance under high loading levels with tight switching budgets. Numerical experiments on IEEE test systems confirm that this joint approach provides significant flexibility compared to line switching alone.