ABSTRACT
Electric power systems are some of the largest human-made systems ever built. The sheer size of the bulk power transmission system forced early power engineers to be among the first to develop computational approaches to solving the equations that describe them. Power system planners and operators rely very heavily on the computational tools to assist them in maintaining a reliable and secure operating environment. The various computational algorithms were developed around the requirements of power system operation. The underlying principle of a power flow problem is that given the system loads, generation, and network configuration, the system bus voltages and line flows can be found by solving the nonlinear power flow equations. The basic objective of the optimal power flow is to find the values of the system state variables and/or parameters that minimize some cost function of the power system. Many power system applications, such as the power flow, offer only a snapshot of the system operation.
