University of Connecticut OpenCommons@UConn Doctoral Dissertations University of Connecticut Graduate School 12-15-2016 An Efficient Solution Methodology for Mixed- Integer Programming Problems Arising in Power Systems Mikhail Bragin University of Connecticut - Storrs,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Bragin, Mikhail, "An Efficient Solution Methodology for Mixed-Integer Programming Problems Arising in Power Systems" (2016). Doctoral Dissertations. 1318. https://opencommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/1318 An Efficient Solution Methodology for Mixed-Integer Programming Problems Arising in Power Systems Mikhail Bragin, PhD University of Connecticut, 2016 For many important mixed-integer programming (MIP) problems, the goal is to obtain near- optimal solutions with quantifiable quality in a computationally efficient manner (within, e.g., 5, 10 or 20 minutes). A traditional method to solve such problems has been Lagrangian relaxation, but the method suffers from zigzagging of multipliers and slow convergence. When solving mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems, the recently adopted branch-and-cut may also suffer from slow convergence because when the convex hull of the problems has complicated facial structures, facet- defining cuts are typically difficult to obtain, and the method relies mostly on time-consuming branching operations. In this thesis, the novel Surrogate Lagrangian Relaxation method is developed and its convergence is proved to the optimal multipliers, without the knowledge of the optimal dual value and without fully optimizing the relaxed problem. Moreover, for practical implementations a stepsizing formula, that guarantees convergence without requiring the optimal dual value, has been constructively developed. The key idea is to select stepsizes in a way that distances between Lagrange multipliers at consecutive iterations decrease, and as a result, Lagrange multipliers converge to a unique limit.