Distributed Power Flow and Distributed Optimization -- Formulation, Solution, and Open Source Implementation

Abstract

Solving the power flow problem in a distributed fashion empowers different grid operators to compute the overall grid state without having to share grid models-this is a practical problem to which industry does not have off-theshelf answers. In cooperation with a German transmission system operator we propose two physically consistent problem formulations (feasibility, leastsquares) amenable to two solution methods from distributed optimization (the Alternating direction method of multipliers (admm), and the Augmented Lagrangian based Alternating Direction Inexact Newton method (aladin)); with aladin there come convergence guarantees for the distributed power flow problem. In addition, we provide open source matlab code for rapid prototyping for distributed power flow (rapidpf), a fully matpower-compatible software that facilitates the laborious task of formulating power flow problems as distributed optimization problems; the code is available under https://github.