Recover Feasible Solutions for SOCP Relaxation of Optimal Power Flow Problems in Mesh Networks

Convex relaxation methods have been studied and used extensively to obtain an optimal solution to the optimal power flow (OPF) problem. Meanwhile, convex relaxed power flow equations are also prerequisites for efficiently solving a wide range of problems in power systems including mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) and distributed optimization. When the exactness of convex relaxations is not guaranteed, it is important to recover a feasible solution for the convex relaxation methods. This paper presents an alternative convex optimization (ACP) approach that can efficiently recover a feasible solution from the result of second-order cone programming (SOCP) relaxed OPF in mesh networks. The OPF problem is first formulated as a difference-of-convex (DC) programming problem, then efficiently solved by a penalty convex concave procedure (CCP). CCP iteratively linearizes the concave parts of the power flow constraints and solves a convex approximation of the DCP problem. Numerical tests show that the proposed method can find a global or near-global optimal solution to the AC OPF problem, and outperforms those semidefinite programming (SDP) based algorithms.