Synthetic Test Case for Ukraine's Power Grid

Power systems research requires realistic test cases to demonstrate and benchmark algorithmic innovations. However, to keep power grid information secure, much of the data for actual systems cannot be publicly released. This motivates the creation of synthetic test cases designed to match the characteristics of actual power grids. By only using publicly available data, these synthetic test cases can be freely released for research and educational purposes. Motivated by the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, this paper presents a synthetic test case for the Ukrainian electric transmission system. With the ability to run power flow and other analyses, this test case is relevant to emerging research and educational activities related to power grid security. To develop the test case, we leveraged publicly available data on population centers, generators, and transmission topology and voltage levels along with synthetic test case creation methodologies from recent literature. After describing the process used to develop this test case, this paper presents validation results using several widely accepted criteria for assessing the test case's realism. As an illustrative application, we demonstrate one use case by solving a bilevel linearization of the
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interdiction problem to identify critical sets of line failures that cause the most load shedding.