Chordal Relaxation Based ACOPF for Unbalanced Distribution Systems With DERs and Voltage Regulation Devices

In emerging distribution systems with a proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible demand assets, operation characters of the unbalance network and voltage regulation devices need to be accurately addressed for ensuring the secure and economic operation. This paper focuses on the modeling and solution approach of AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) for unbalanced distribution systems with DERs and voltage regulation transformers (VRT). The ACOPF problem is formulated as a chordal relaxation based semidefinite programming (SDP) model, and a tighter convexification model of VRTs is proposed for mitigating solution inexactness. Analytical conditions are presented and proved to determine whether global optimal solution to the original ACOPF problem can be retrieved from solutions of the chordal relaxation based SDP model. Numerical studies on modified IEEE 34-bus and 8500-node systems show that the proposed approach presents a better computational performance as compared to rank relaxation based SDP approaches and general nonlinear solvers.