Consensus-based distributed optimal power flow algorithm

Optimal power flow (OPF) is a well known challenging optimization problem for power systems engineering. There have been a myriad of works dedicated to solving OPF problems in a centralized way, i.e. using a centralized solver, which necessitates for a central control center to receive and transmit a large amount of data. Recently, few attempts have been done to solve OPF problems in a distributed way, which means that the computations are distributed over the whole network, reducing the need for communications (with a central control center) and increasing the robustness of the control to loss of communications and to unexpected faults in the network nodes. Furthermore, a decentralized solution to the OPF problem has the advantage to be flexible to the network topology and size, since the computations are distributed over the network. In this paper we propose some preliminary results on a distributed OPF algorithm, to solve the original OPF problem, i.e. without any convexification steps. We propose a consensus-based distributed OPF algorithm, which uses consensus algorithm to estimate the optimization variables between neighboring nodes in a given network. We test the performance of this algorithm on the IEEE 14-node test-case.