Finding Improved Local Minima of Power System Optimization Problems by Interior-Point Methods

This paper presents a simple heuristic technique to deal with multiple local minima in nonconvex, nonlinear, power system optimization problems by solving a sequence of interior point subproblems. Both the real-valued and the mixed-integer cases are discussed separately. The method is then applied to the unit commitment problem, and its performance on realistic cases is compared with that of a genetic algorithm.