Radial partitioning with spectral penalty parameter selection in distributed optimization for power systems

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel concept of intelligent partitioning for group-based distributed optimization (DO) algorithms applied to optimal power flow (OPF) problems. Radial partitioning of the graph of a network is introduced as a systematic way to split a large-scale problem into more tractable sub-problems, which can potentially be solved efficiently with methods such as convex relaxations. Spectral parameter selection is introduced for group-based DO as a crucial hyper-parameter selection step in DO. A software package DiCARP is created, which is implemented in Python using the Pyomo optimization package. Through several numerical examples, we compare the proposed group-based algorithm to component-based approaches, evaluate our radial partitioning method against other partitioning strategies, and assess adaptive parameter selection in comparison to non-adaptive methods. The results highlight the critical role of effective partitioning and parameter selection in solving large-scale network optimization problems.