Alternating current optimal power flow with generator selection

Abstract

We investigate a mixed-integer variant of the alternating current optimal flow problem. The binary variables activate and deactivate power generators installed at a subset of nodes of the electrical grid. We propose some formulations and a mixed-integer semidefinite programming relaxation, from which we derive two mixed-integer diagonally dominant programming approximation (inner and outer, the latter providing a relaxation). We discuss dimensionality reduction methods to extract solution vectors from solution matrices, and present some computational results showing how both our approximations provide tight bounds.