Combinatorial Problems Arising in Deregulated Electrical Power Industry: Survey and Future Directions

We study the complexity of various combinatorial problems arising in the context of production and transmission of electric power. The problems studied here are motivated by the recent shift towards deregulating the electric power industry. These problems are natural NP-hard generalizations of the single (multi)-commodity flow problems. A prototypical problem arising in this context a network with fixed link capacities that may have to service large demands when necessary. In particular, individual demands are allowed to exceed capacities, and thus flows for some request pairs necessarily have to be split into different flow-paths.

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