IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2021 - 65

DSSs
The second key aspect of the future operational philosophy
is an extensive usage of DSSs to assist the personnel involved
in core TSO tasks in decision making. As detailed in Figure 10,
the four core TSO activities to ensure system security
are 1) grid reinforcement and expansion, 2) maintenance
scheduling for transmission assets, 3) congestion management, and 4) control actions in real-time system operation.
Today, these four activities typically follow a chronological
sequence and interact in a mostly unidirectional way from
left to right, as depicted with the gray arrows in the figure.
We believe that higher effectiveness across the entire activity chain can be achieved if the degree of bidirectional information flow increases, namely if there is the consideration of

activities closer to real time within the ones in the planning
phase (indicated with black arrows in Figure 10).
Within this general vision, we specifically propose an
approach to integrate the maintenance scheduling (outage
planning) and congestion management (congestion forecast, security analysis, and remedial actions) phases of the
activity chain. Today, Swissgrid's operational planning team
receives maintenance plans from transmission asset owners
(ownership of Swissgrid), generation asset owners, distribution asset owners (only to a limited extent), and transmission
assets of neighboring TSOs. Information comes through

15
14
Normalized RMSE (%)

buses, the 1-h-ahead forecasts are better (orange circles in
the figure), there are also several buses with 7-h-ahead forecasts with higher accuracy than the 1-h-ahead ones. Future
investigations can focus on tracing the cause of these imperfections and improve the performance by either optimizing
the load allocation factors applied in the forecast model or
switching to a new forecasting approach.
By splitting the data set into the periods before and
after the lockdown in Switzerland as a measure against
the COVID-19 pandemic, we can analyze the effect of the
lockdown on the forecast quality. As seen in Figure 9, the
RMSEs are significantly lower in the prelockdown period,
especially for longer prediction horizons. This can be partly
attributed to the fact that the forecasts have a strong seasonality component, which resulted in an overestimation of the
net load demand in the weeks right after the lockdown.

Before Lockdown
After Lockdown

13
12
11
10
9
8
7
6
5

1

3

5
7
9
Forecast Horizon (h)

11

figure 9. The effect of anti-COVID-19 lockdown measures (applied 16 March 2020) on the intraday congestion
forecast error.

Goal: Network Security

Portal

Grid Expansion

Maintenance Planning

Congestion Management

System Operation

10 Years Ahead,
Updated Every
Four Years

One Year Ahead,
Updated Monthly
and Weekly

One Year Ahead,
One Week Ahead,
One Day Ahead, Intraday

Real Time

figure 10. Strengthening the links among the core TSO activities will enhance network security with a focus on maintenance planning and congestion management. (This image has been designed using resources from Flaticon.com.)
march/april 2021

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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - March/April 2021

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