A Penalty Method Based on a Gauss-Newton Scheme for AC-OPF

We propose a globally convergent and robust GaussNewton algorithm for finding a (local) optimal solution of a nonconvex and possibly non-smooth optimization problem arising from AC optimal power flow on meshed networks. The algorithm that we present is based on a Gauss-Newton-type iteration for an exact penalty reformulation of the power flow problem. We compare our algorithm with a state-of-the-art solver, IPOPT, on several representative problem instances in MATPOWER. We demonstrate the comparable performance of our method for a variety of the MATPOWER test cases.