Chordal relaxation of OPF for multiphase radial networks

Abstract

We formulate optimal power flow problem for unbalanced multiphase radial networks. We show that there is an equivalent single-phase mesh network that has a radial structure at the macro-level and a clique structure corresponding to each line in the radial network. Existing sufficient conditions for exact semidefinite relaxation are therefore applicable to unbalanced multiphase networks. In particular, they imply that if a semidefinite relaxation is exact over each of the cliques in the mesh equivalent network, then it is exact for the entire network.

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