A Novel Linear Optimal Power Flow Model for Three-Phase Electrical Distribution Systems

This paper presents a new linear optimal power flow model for three-phase unbalanced electrical distribution systems considering binary variables. The proposed formulation is a mixed-integer linear programming problem, aiming at minimizing the operational costs of the network while guaranteeing operational constraints. Two new linearizations for branch current and nodal voltage magnitudes are introduced. The proposed branch current magnitude linearization provides a discretization of the Euclidean norm through a set of intersecting planes; while the bus voltage magnitude approximation uses a linear combination of the L1 and the L∞ norm. Results were obtained for an unbalanced distribution system, in order to assess the accuracy of the linear formulation when compared to a nonlinear power flow with fixed power injections, showing errors of less than 4\% for currents and 0.005\% for voltages.