A Shifted Penalty Function Approach for Optimal Load-Flow

Penalty function methods have been widely used for solving constrained nonlinear programming problems that arise in optimal load-flow analysis of power systems. One of the basic drawbacks of these methods is that the Hessian of the penalty function becames ill-conditioned as-the penalty factor takes very large (or small) values. Conseqpently minimisation of the penalty function becomes rather a difficult task even for an efficient optimiser.