A Hierarchical Optimization Architecture for Large-Scale Power Networks

Abstract: We present a hierarchical optimization architecture for large-scale power networks that overcomes limitations of fully centralized and fully decentralized architectures. The architecture leverages principles of multigrid computing schemes, which are widely used in the solution of partial differential equations on massively parallel computers. The top layer of the architecture uses a coarse representation of the entire network while the bottom layer is composed of a family of decentralized optimization agents each operating on a network subdomain at full resolution. We use an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework to drive coordination of the decentralized agents. We show that state and dual information obtained from the top layer can be used to accelerate the coordination of the decentralized optimization agents and to recover optimality for the entire system. We demonstrate that the hierarchical architecture can be used to manage large collections of microgrids.