A tight compact quadratically constrained convex relaxation of the Optimal Power Flow problem

In this paper, we consider the Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem which consists in determining the power production at each bus of an electric network by minimizing the production cost. Our contribution is an exact solution algorithm for the OPF problem. It consists in a spatial branch-and-bound algorithm based on a compact quadratically-constrained convex relaxation. It is computed by solving the semidefinite rank relaxation of OPF once at the root node of the algorithm. An important result is that the optimal value of our compact relaxation is equal to the rank relaxation value. Then, at every sub-nodes of our branch-and-bound, the lower bound is obtained by solving a quadratic convex problem instead of an SDP. Another contribution is that we add only O(n+m) variables that model the squares of the initial variables, where n is the number of buses in the power system and m the number of transmission lines, to construct our relaxation. Then, since the relations between the initial and auxiliary variables are non-convex, we relax them to get a quadratic convex relaxation. Finally, in our branch-and-bound algorithm, we only have to force a reduced number of equalities to prove global optimality. This quadratic convex relaxation approach is here tailored to the OPF problem, but it can address any application whose formulation is a quadratic optimization problem subject to quadratic equalities and ring constraints. Our first experiments on instances of the OPF problem show that our new algorithm Compact OPF (COPF) is more efficient than the standard solvers and other quadratic convex relaxation based methods we compare it with.