Optimal power flow utilizing FPGA technology

Optimal power flow (OPF) is a performance driven application in energy management systems that is currently performed on high-performance workstations. However, general purpose processors perform poorly due to irregular data structures commonly encountered in power system analysis. We propose the use of FPGA hardware to accelerate floating point performance in the evaluation of OPF. Our results indicate that LU performance can be enhanced by 6x and overall large-scale OPF computation by at least 3x using FPGA technology over general-purpose workstations.