A non-interior point approach to optimum power flow solution

A formulation of the optimum power flow problem using a smoothing variable based non-interior point method is presented in this paper. Here a combination of regular smoothing method and Jacobian smoothing method is used. The proposed method makes use of the slack variables to handle the inequality constraints, Dual variables to form the Lagrangian function and employs the KKT optimality condition and Newton's method to solve the resultant equations. But instead of the logarithmic barrier to handle the complementary condition, the proposed method uses a smoothing function and thereby overcomes the limitation of the variables to be in the interior of the feasible space through all iterations. Also, the smoothing parameter is treated as a variable of the original problem thus avoiding the necessity of heuristics in updating the value of the smoothing parameter, which approaches zero as the convergence is approached. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.