1,915 research outputs found
Inexact Convex Relaxations for AC Optimal Power Flow: Towards AC Feasibility
Convex relaxations of AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problems have attracted
significant interest as in several instances they provably yield the global
optimum to the original non-convex problem. If, however, the relaxation is
inexact, the obtained solution is not AC-feasible. The quality of the obtained
solution is essential for several practical applications of AC-OPF, but
detailed analyses are lacking in existing literature. This paper aims to cover
this gap. We provide an in-depth investigation of the solution characteristics
when convex relaxations are inexact, we assess the most promising AC
feasibility recovery methods for large-scale systems, and we propose two new
metrics that lead to a better understanding of the quality of the identified
solutions. We perform a comprehensive assessment on 96 different test cases,
ranging from 14 to 3120 buses, and we show the following: (i) Despite an
optimality gap of less than 1%, several test cases still exhibit substantial
distances to both AC feasibility and local optimality and the newly proposed
metrics characterize these deviations. (ii) Penalization methods fail to
recover an AC-feasible solution in 15 out of 45 cases, and using the proposed
metrics, we show that most failed test instances exhibit substantial distances
to both AC-feasibility and local optimality. For failed test instances with
small distances, we show how our proposed metrics inform a fine-tuning of
penalty weights to obtain AC-feasible solutions. (iii) The computational
benefits of warm-starting non-convex solvers have significant variation, but a
computational speedup exists in over 75% of the cases
Convex Relaxations and Approximations of Chance-Constrained AC-OPF Problems
This paper deals with the impact of linear approximations for the unknown
nonconvex confidence region of chance-constrained AC optimal power flow
problems. Such approximations are required for the formulation of tractable
chance constraints. In this context, we introduce the first formulation of a
chance-constrained second-order cone (SOC) OPF. The proposed formulation
provides convergence guarantees due to its convexity, while it demonstrates
high computational efficiency. Combined with an AC feasibility recovery, it is
able to identify better solutions than chance-constrained nonconvex AC-OPF
formulations. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to perform
a rigorous analysis of the AC feasibility recovery procedures for robust
SOC-OPF problems. We identify the issues that arise from the linear
approximations, and by using a reformulation of the quadratic chance
constraints, we introduce new parameters able to reshape the approximation of
the confidence region. We demonstrate our method on the IEEE 118-bus system
Inexactness of the Hydro-Thermal Coordination Semidefinite Relaxation
Hydro-thermal coordination is the problem of determining the optimal economic
dispatch of hydro and thermal power plants over time. The physics of
hydroelectricity generation is commonly simplified in the literature to account
for its fundamentally nonlinear nature. Advances in convex relaxation theory
have allowed the advent of Shor's semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations of
quadratic models of the problem. This paper shows how a recently published SDP
relaxation is only exact if a very strict condition regarding turbine
efficiency is observed, failing otherwise. It further proposes the use of a set
of convex envelopes as a strategy to successfully obtain a stricter lower bound
of the optimal solution. This strategy is combined with a standard iterative
convex-concave procedure to recover a stationary point of the original
non-convex problem.Comment: Submitted to IEEE PES General Meeting 201
Scalable Semidefinite Relaxation for Maximum A Posterior Estimation
Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference over discrete Markov random fields is a
fundamental task spanning a wide spectrum of real-world applications, which is
known to be NP-hard for general graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel
semidefinite relaxation formulation (referred to as SDR) to estimate the MAP
assignment. Algorithmically, we develop an accelerated variant of the
alternating direction method of multipliers (referred to as SDPAD-LR) that can
effectively exploit the special structure of the new relaxation. Encouragingly,
the proposed procedure allows solving SDR for large-scale problems, e.g.,
problems on a grid graph comprising hundreds of thousands of variables with
multiple states per node. Compared with prior SDP solvers, SDPAD-LR is capable
of attaining comparable accuracy while exhibiting remarkably improved
scalability, in contrast to the commonly held belief that semidefinite
relaxation can only been applied on small-scale MRF problems. We have evaluated
the performance of SDR on various benchmark datasets including OPENGM2 and PIC
in terms of both the quality of the solutions and computation time.
Experimental results demonstrate that for a broad class of problems, SDPAD-LR
outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in producing better MAP assignment in
an efficient manner.Comment: accepted to International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2014
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