A new heuristic approach to deal with discrete variables in optimal power flow computations

This paper proposes a new heuristic approach to deal with discrete
variables in an optimal power flow (OPF). This approach relies on
the first order sensitivity of the objective and inequality
constraints with respect to the discrete variables. The impact of a
discrete variable change on the objective and inequality constraints
is aggregated into a merit function. The proposed approach searches
iteratively for better discrete variable settings as long as the
problem solution can be improved. We provide numerical results with
the proposed approach on four test systems up to 1203 buses and for
the OPF problem of active power loss minimization.