An Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers-Based Distributed Optimization Method for Solving Security-Constrained Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow

When optimizing electric power system operational decisions, it is of great importance to prevent potential failures in both the system operation and the optimization algorithm. In “An Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers-Based Distributed Optimization Method for Solving Security-Constrained Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow,” Gholami, Sun, Zhang, and Sun propose a novel two-level algorithm that (1) effectively prevents power system operational failures through consideration of impactful contingencies and (2) guarantees convergence when parallelized on a computing cluster with multiple nodes. Extensive numerical experiments suggest that the proposed algorithm is able to provide high-quality feasible solutions under the time limit of 10–45 minutes for various synthetic and industrial networks with up to 30,000 buses and 22,000 contingencies, comparable with the size of the U.S. power grid.