I wish to thank Professor Jim McDonald for giving me the opportunity to study at The Institute for Energy and Environment and for permitting me the freedom to pursue my own research interests. I also wish to thank my supervisors, Professor Graeme Burt and Dr Stuart Galloway, for their guidance and scholarship. Most of all, I wish to thank my parents, my big brother and my little sister for all of their support throughout my PhD. This thesis leverages several open source software projects

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... ed by researchers from other institutions. I wish to thank the researchers from Cornell University involved in the development of the optimal power flow formulations in Matpower, most especially Dr Ray Zimmerman. I am similarly grateful for the work by researchers at Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA) and the Technical University of Munich on reinforcement learning algorithm and artificial neural network implementations.