A Clique Merging Algorithm to Solve Semidefinite Relaxations of Optimal Power Flow Problems

Semidefinite Programming (SDP) is a powerful technique to compute tight lower bounds for Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problems. Even using clique decomposition techniques, semidefinite relaxations are still computationally demanding. However, there are many different clique decompositions for the same SDP problem and they are not equivalent in terms of computation time. In this paper, we propose a new strategy to compute efficient clique decompositions with a clique merging heuristic. This heuristic is based on two different estimates of the computational burden of an SDP problem: the size of the problem and an estimation of a per-iteration cost for a state-of-the-art interior-point algorithm. We compare our strategy with other algorithms on MATPOWER instances and we show a significant decrease in solver time.