An investigation of the solution to the optimal power flow problem incorporating continuation methods

The computation of the optimal power flow (OPF) remains a difficult nonlinear programming problem. An investigation is made of a solution methodology based on the continuation method, a parametric technique. In this algorithm, the continuation method is applied at various stages. The proposed algorithm uses the sequential quadratic programming strategy, but it replaces the standard subproblem module by a new parametric module. The varying-limits strategy used seems quite fast for solving the quadratic programs, and is formulated to be useful as a dispatching tool. In a second application of continuation methods, a load tracking outer loop is grafted to the nonlinear solver. This quickly produces (discrete) optimal solution trajectories when fed the forecasted system loads as input