Toward the development of a Trust-Tech-based methodology for solving mixed integer nonlinear optimization

Abstract

Many applications of smart grid can be formulated as constrained optimization problems. Because of the discrete controls involved in power systems, these problems are essentially mixed-integer nonlinear programs. In this paper, we review the Trust-Tech-based methodology for solving mixed-integer nonlinear optimization. Specifically, we have developed a two-stage Trust-Tech-based methodology to systematically compute all the local optimal solutions for constrained mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems. In the first stage, for a given MINLP problem this methodology starts with the construction of a new, continuous, unconstrained problem through relaxation and the penalty function method. A corresponding dynamical system is then constructed to search for a set of local optimal solutions for the unconstrained problem. In the second stage, a reduced constrained NLP is defined for each local optimal solution by determining and fixing the values of integral variables of the MINLP problem. The Trust-Tech-based method is used to compute a set of local optimal solutions for these reduced NLP problems, from which the optimal solution of the original MINLP problem is determined. A numerical simulation of several testing problems is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.