Abstract
Power system benchmarks are transmission and distribution networks used to evaluate novel control algorithms and simulate grid evolution scenarios. These benchmarks range in size, system characteristics, and use cases. Although active working groups have created and published many benchmarks, these networks are not all representative of a given region and may not consider certain aspects such as increased penetration levels of distributed energy resources. To address these issues, synthetic benchmark networks and methodologies for generating them have been developed by various research groups. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of procedures commonly used to generate synthetic networks and a detailed account of the various metrics used to define and validate benchmarks. Existing models are categorized into different approaches, including expert design, anonymized clustering, statistical sampling, and heuristic algorithms. Deep graph generation based techniques are also presented and recommended for the network generation problem. A comparative summary is provided to highlight the different existing works in this area and reveal research gaps, along with a list of published datasets and their characteristics.