  In recent years the power systems research community has seen an explosion of
work applying operations research techniques to challenging power network
optimization problems. Regardless of the application under consideration, all
of these works rely on power system test cases for evaluation and validation.
However, many of the well established power system test cases were developed as
far back as the 1960s with the aim of testing AC power flow algorithms. It is
unclear if these power flow test cases are suitable for power system
optimization studies. This report surveys all of the publicly available AC
transmission system test cases, to the best of our knowledge, and assess their
suitability for optimization tasks. It finds that many of the traditional test
cases are missing key network operation constraints, such as line thermal
limits and generator capability curves. To incorporate these missing
constraints, data driven models are developed from a variety of publicly
available data sources. The resulting extended test cases form a compressive
archive, NESTA, for the evaluation and validation of power system optimization
algorithms.
