The Optimal Reactive Dispatch problem is a nonlinear programming problem containing continuous and discrete control variables. Owing to the difficulty caused by discrete variables, this problem is usually solved assuming that all variables are continuous. The discrete variables are rounded off to the closest discrete value and the problem is solved again. This approach may provide no optimal or may be impossible to obtain feasible solutions. This paper presents an efficient handling of discrete variables by auxiliary function so that the problem becomes continuous and differentiable. Simulations with IEEE test systems were performed showing the efficiency of the proposed approach.
Optimal Power Flow; Newton method; Nonlinear programming; Interior point method
