Decomposed iterative optimal power flow with automatic regionalization

The optimal power flow (OPF) problem plays an important role in power system operation and control. The problem is nonconvex and NP-hard, hence global optimality is not guaranteed and the complexity grows exponentially with the size of the system. Therefore, centralized optimization techniques are not suitable for large-scale systems and an efficient decomposed implementation of OPF is highly demanded. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient method to decompose the entire system into multiple sub-systems based on automatic regionalization and acquire the OPF solution across sub-systems via a modified MATPOWER solver. The proposed method is implemented in a modified solver and tested on several IEEE Power System Test Cases. The performance is shown to be more appealing compared with the original solver.