Finding improved local minima of power system optimization problems by interior-point methods

This paper presents a simple heuristic technique to deal with multiple local minima in nonconvex, nonlinear power system optimization problems by solving a sequence of interior-point subproblems. Both the real-valued and the mixed-integer cases are separately discussed. The method is then applied to the unit commitment problem and its performance on realistic cases is compared with that of a genetic algorithm (GA).