Novel Approach Towards Global Optimality of Optimal Power Flow Using Quadratic Convex Optimization
This addresses the challenge of solving optimal power flow to global optimality for power system operators, though it appears incremental as it adapts an existing method.
The authors tackled the non-convex optimal power flow problem by specializing the MIQCR method to achieve global optimality, testing it on networks from two to over a thousand buses with encouraging results.
Optimal Power Flow (OPF) can be modeled as a non-convex Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program (QCQP). Our purpose is to solve OPF to global optimality. To this end, we specialize the Mixed-Integer Quadratic Convex Reformulation method (MIQCR) to (OPF). This is a method in two steps. First, a Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) relaxation of (OPF) is solved. Then the optimal dual variables of this relaxation are used to reformulate OPF into an equivalent new quadratic program, where all the non-convexity is moved to one additional constraint. In the second step, this reformulation is solved within a branch-and-bound algorithm, where at each node a quadratic and convex relaxation of the reformulated problem, obtained by relaxing the non-convex added constraint, is solved. The key point of our approach is that the lower bound at the root node of the branch-and-bound tree is equal to the SDP relaxation value. We test this method on several OPF cases, from two-bus networks to more-than-a-thousand-buses networks from the MAT-POWER repository. Our first results are very encouraging.