This paper extends to the load flow problem the factorized solution methodology recently developed for equality-constrained state estimation. Experimental results are included showing that the factorized load flow is more robust than the standard NR method, while remaining computationally competitive.
This paper extends to the load flow problem the factorized solution methodology recently developed for equality-constrained state estimation. Experimental results are included showing that the factorized load flow is more robust than the standard NR method, while remaining computationally competitive.
This paper extends to the load flow problem the factorized solution methodology recently developed for equality-constrained state estimation. Experimental results are included showing that the factorized load flow is more robust than the standard NR method, while remaining computationally competitive.
Factorized Load Flow Antonio Gmez-Expsito, Fellow, IEEE, and Catalina Gmez-Quiles, Member, IEEE AbstractThis paper extends to the load ow problem the fac- torized solution methodology recently developed for equality-con- strained state estimation. This is done by considering a redundant set of initial conditions in order to transform the undetermined system arising in the rst linear stage into an overdetermined one. The second nonlinear stage proceeds exactly like in the state esti- mation case. Experimental results are included showing that the factorized load ow is more robust than the standard NR method, while remaining computationally competitive. Index TermsEquality constraints, factorized solution, load ow, state estimation, weighted least squares (WLS). I. INTRODUCTION A LTHOUGH rudimentary load ow (LF) solution proce- dures were introduced late in the 1950s, it was not until the seventies that efcient techniques, taking advantage of and preserving the Jacobian sparsity, made the quadratically conver- gent Newton-Raphson (NR) scheme fully competitive [1], [2]. Since then, a number of improvements (component mod- eling, computational saving by parallel computation, solution adjustments) and alternative solution techniques (constant Jacobians, approximate DC solutions, second-order methods, globally convergent schemes, etc.) have been proposed, of which very few have found widespread use in industry. By far, along with the basic NR algorithm in polar form, the most successful implementation is the so-called fast decoupled load ow [3]. The reader is referred to the excellent survey [4] or the more recent compilation provided in [5, Ch. 3] for a detailed account of the power ow problem and associated issues. The state estimation (SE) notion for power systems was also introduced early in the seventies [6], in an attempt to circum- vent the limitations arising in primitive SCADAs fromthe direct use of LF solvers for real-time network monitoring purposes. In addition to power injections and bus voltages, state estimators can readily use power ow measurements, relying on the avail- able redundancy to reduce the uncertainty of the computed state vector. Like in the LF case, the nonlinear weighted least squares (WLS) original formulation has been the subject of extensive research. This includes numerical improvements to the iterative procedure based on the Normal equations (orthogonal factoriza- tion, equality-constrained and augmented schemes), robustness against bad data (normalized residual test, non-quadratic SE) or the use of increasingly higher redundancy levels to detect and Manuscript received January 10, 2013; revised April 15, 2013; accepted May 22, 2013. Date of publication June 13, 2013; date of current version October 17, 2013. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under grant ENE2010-18867. Paper no. TPWRS-00031-2013. The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Seville, Seville, Spain (e-mail: age@us.es; catalinagq@us.es). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPWRS.2013.2265298 correct topology and parameter errors. The reader is referred to [7] and [8] for an overview of the SE problem (see also [9] for a more detailed treatment of this topic). As early noted by pioneers, the SE reduces to an LF solution when there is no redundancy at all and the critical set of mea- surements does not contain power ows. In this case, the mea- surement Jacobian is nonsingular and there is no need to build the gain matrix. For the purposes of this paper, the equality-constrained SE formulation, in which a subset of (real or virtual) measurements has to be exactly enforced, is of most interest [10]. In this case, there is also a straightforward, yet not so well known, relation- ship between the equality-constrained SE and the LF, which is fully exploited in this work. Recently, a two-stage SE solution methodology has been pro- posed [11], which is nding a number of applications in hierar- chical state estimation. Of particular interest is the case when the rst stage reduces to a linear WLS problem, since this leads to a factorized formulation which shows better convergence rates and has proved to be faster than the Gauss-Newton (GN) iter- ative scheme, based on the Normal equations [12], [13]. Such a factorized scheme can be easily extended to the equality-con- strained case by simply augmenting the involved equation sys- tems [14]. This paper is aimed at extending the factorized SE solution methodology, developed so far, to the LF problem, which is straightforward by adopting a unied vision that considers the LF as a particular case of the equality-constrained SE. The paper is organized as follows: Section II summarizes the equality-constrained SE, which is formally related to the LF problem in Section III. Then, Section IV reviews the re- cently-introduced factorized SE models. This constitutes the basis of the factorized LF models presented in Section V, which are tested and compared to the NR method in Section VI. II. EQUALITY-CONSTRAINED STATE ESTIMATION For the sake of self-sufciency, the equality-constrained WLS SE formulation is reviewed below (the reader is referred to [9] and [10] for further details). Exact quantities, such as zero injections, can be easily accom- modated into the WLS estimation model by explicitly adding the necessary constraints to the regular measurement equations: (1) (2) where state vector to be estimated, composed of bus voltage magnitudes, , and phase angles, (size , being the number of buses); measurement vector; 0885-8950 2013 IEEE 4608 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2013 vector of functions relating error-free measurements with state variables; vector of measurement errors, customarily assumed to be and uncorrelated, with covariance matrix ; vector of exactly known quantities ( for null injections); vector of functions relating with state variables. The associated optimization problem consists of minimizing the Lagrangian: (3) which leads to the repeated solution, until convergence, of the following system: (4) where , is the vector of Lagrange multipliers and represents the iteration index. A simpler and more widespread scheme consists of con- sidering exact quantities as pseudo-measurements with much larger weights than those associated with regular measure- ments, which leads to the following Normal equations, in standard form: (5) or, carrying out the products (6) where is a sufciently small scalar. There is a risk of unacceptable ill-conditioning if is too small, but values in the order of , or even smaller, are well tolerated by present computers, particularly if orthogonal de- composition of the Jacobian [15], rather than Cholesky factor- ization of the gain matrix, is adopted. For practical purposes, the solutions provided by (4) and (6) are identical in most instances. III. LOAD FLOW AS AN EQUALITY-CONSTRAINED STATE ESTIMATION If the number of equality constraints (2) equals (state vector size), and the resulting Jacobian is of full rank, then the es- timate is fully determined, irrespective of the number, values and uncertainty of measurements in (1). Indeed, from the lower equation in (4), or from (6) with , the standard Newton- Raphson (NR) load ow iterative process is easily obtained (7) The above statement is trivial and well-known, except for the following key observation: whereas in the conventional NR-based iterative scheme (7) the only degree of freedom is the starting point , in the equality-constrained WLS approach (4) we can additionally choose arbitrary values for and . In fact, no matter how many extra measurements or pseudomea- surements we include in , the solution will remain the same, so long as . For practical purposes, adding the redundant set of pseu- domeasurements (1) to the conventional LF model (2), is useless, since the solution of (4) does not provide any computa- tional advantage compared to the simpler system (7). However, as explained in the sequel, this pretty simple idea can be applied to the factorized SE model recently proposed in [12], [13], yielding a new family of LF solution procedures which can be advantageous over the conventional NR method. Note that the values of , which do not have to be actual measurements in the SE sense, could even change on the y during the iterative process, without any consequence for the computed solution (provided convergence is nally achieved). This idea is the basis of the new iterative scheme specically developed for the LF problem in this paper (Section V-B). IV. FACTORIZED STATE ESTIMATION For the sake of completeness, both the unconstrained and equality-constrained factorized WLS SE models introduced re- spectively in [13] and [14] will be reviewed here. A. Unconstrained Factorized Model In this approach, the following state vectors are involved: State vector . Unlike in the conventional formulation, voltage magnitudes are replaced for convenience in the factorized model by their log counterparts: (8) where . Intermediate vector : (9) where and, for each branch connecting buses and , the following pair of variables is adopted: (10) (11) Vector then comprises variables ( being the number of branches). Intermediate vector , composed also of variables (12) where When those vectors are introduced, the conventional non- linear measurement model (1) can be decomposed into two linear models: (13) (14) GMEZ-EXPSITO AND GMEZ-QUILES: FACTORIZED LOAD FLOW 4609 which become coupled through a trivial nonlinear transform (change of variables) (15) The nonlinear function , as well as the constant matrices and , are easily obtained fromthe above denitions (see [13] for the details). Of particular interest is the Jacobian of , composed of diagonal scalars plus , 2 2 diagonal blocks, as follows: (16) (17) the inverse of which are (18) (19) Therefore, unlike the Jacobian of the conventional nonlinear model, obtaining involves virtually no computations. For the sake of compactness, the two-stage solution proce- dure in the unconstrained case will not be detailed herein, since it is a particular case of the equality-constrained version de- scribed next (simply remove equality constraints). B. Equality-Constrained Factorized Model In the factorized formulation the nonlinear constraints (2) become also linear in terms of the auxiliary vector . There- fore, adopting the same notation as in the unconstrained case above, the nonlinear equality-constrained model (1)(2) can be rewritten as (20) (21) (22) where the only nonlinear term is . The best estimate of the pair is provided by solving the following equality-constrained optimization problem: (23) which reduces to the sequential solution of two WLS simpler problems, as follows: Step 1) Obtain a preliminary estimate by solving the augmented system (24) where . The symmetric coefcient matrix is termed the augmented gain matrix (in the sequel, the subindex a will be used to denote augmented matrices). Step 2.1: Use the estimate provided by Step 1 to ini- tialize by solving the following augmented system: (25) where Step 2.2: Starting with , repeatedly solve the following system until is sufciently small: (26) where and the Jacobian is computed at . In summary, this formulation proceeds by rst computing from the linear system (24) and then iterating with (26) until necessary to obtain . With high redundancy levels and rather accurate measurements, it was found that the estimate pro- vided by (25) can be sufciently accurate in practice. It is worth stressing again that both and are triv- ially obtained, which is the main advantage of the factorized formulation (the nonlinear functions arising in the con- ventional formulation cannot be inverted in this fashion). Both the unconstrained and equality-constrained factorized solution schemes have proved to be computationally more ef- cient than their GN-based counterparts. Lower solution times stem from both lower costs per iteration and reduced iteration count. Owing to the improved estimate provided by the rst WLS linear problem, the second WLS stage provides satisfac- tory solutions typically in just one or at most two iterations. By contrast, the conventional nonlinear formulation has to resort to the at start in absence of previous information. V. FACTORIZED LOAD FLOW FORMULATIONS With the above notation, the factorized load ow model con- sists of nding the pair simultaneously satisfying the fol- lowing two equations: (27) (28) which reduce to the standard model when is eliminated: (29) In accordance with the state vector introduced above, which comprises for convenience all bus voltage magnitudes in log form, the vector of specied quantities must also contain all PV-bus voltage magnitudes: 4610 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2013 Even though PV-bus voltage magnitudes can be removed from both and , like in the standard NR-based polar formula- tion, retaining those quantities will be very helpful in the fac- torized formulation to deal with PV-bus reactive power limits (see Section V-D). As shown in Section III, the load ow can be regarded as a critically-constrained state estimation, to which arbitrary pseu- domeasurements of the form(20) can be added without affecting the estimate, which becomes in fact the load ow solution. While this is useless in the compact LF formulation, in the fac- torized model those pseudomeasurements are helpful, in com- bination with the underdetermined system (27), to render the intermediate vector fully observable, which is a requirement of the two-step procedure reviewed in the previous section. The factorized load owproblemreduces therefore to solving the constrained WLS problem (23), to be compared with the so- lution of the more compact conventional system (7). The fol- lowing remarks are in order: The number and choice of pseudomeasurements in (20) should guarantee that, when used in combination with (21), is observable. The simplest choice for , assuring not only observability of but also certain redundancy, is , where is a set of assumed values for , in which case reduces to the identity matrix. Also, the values of are theoretically irrelevant. In prac- tice, however, the more accurate they are the better estima- tions are provided by the rst WLS problem arising in the factorized approach. For the same reason, the weighting matrix , reecting in the SE case the relative accuracy of components, can be arbitrarily chosen in the LF case. The default choice in this work will be . In what follows, the two-stage WLS solution approach reviewed above, initially devised for the SE problem, will be adapted to the simpler LF case. A. Equality-Constrained Formulation The two-step scheme described in Section IV-B is of direct application to the LF case simply by assuming that represents a set of equally-uncertain initial conditions, rather than actual measurements or pseudomeasurements. The simplest choice is and , leading to For the sake of clarity, the two steps arising in this simplied case will be repeated herein: Step 1: Obtain a preliminary estimate by solving the augmented system (30) which, in turn, can be easily solved in two stages as follows: Step 1.1: Compute from Step 1.2: Obtain In this particular case the estimate can be interpreted as the vector that, satisfying the network bus constraints (27), mini- mizes the Euclidean distance to . In other words, the WLS problem arising in Step 1 reduces to a constrained least-distance problem. Step 2.1: Use the estimate provided by Step 1 to initialize by solving (25). In this case, with , the weighting matrix reduces to (31) where can be shown to be a diagonal matrix. Step 2.2: Starting with , repeatedly solve (26) until is sufciently small. In the LF case the iterative process is customarily stopped when rather than is sufciently small. Since has to be computed anyway to solve (26), the mismatch vector is readily obtained as a byproduct during the iterative process. Note however that the choice of the stopping criterion may affect the number of iterations. B. Sequential Iterative Scheme The factorized solution scheme described above is directly adapted from the SE problem, in which vector represents ac- tual measurements with given uncertainty. As this information remains constant throughout the solution process it makes no sense to repeat Step 1. In the factorized load ow case, however, vector is a vector of pseudomeasurements ( ) intended to render observable. The more accurate is the more appro- priate is to start iterating in Step 2. Based on this observation, an alternative iterative scheme is possible in the LF case by updating the values of in Step 1 after each iteration of Step 2. In this scheme, steps 1 and 2 are sequentially performed until convergence, as follows: Step 1: Obtain by solving the augmented system (30). Step 2.1: Obtain by solving (25). Step 2.2: Update . If is small enough, then stop. Otherwise go back to Step 1. From the computational point of view, it is worth noting that successive runs of Step 1 are very fast, provided the solution adjustments discussed in Section V-D do not modify the co- efcients of the gain matrix. In such cases, Step 1 reduces to updating the right-hand side vector in (30), followed by for- ward/backward elimination (this is called warm start, to be distinguished from the initial cold start). C. Formulations With Two Weight Scales The preceding formulations can be advantageously replaced in practice by unconstrained ones if pseudomeasurements (20) are considered several orders of magnitude less accurate than equality constraints (21). As discussed below, these for- mulations are very well tailored to easily incorporate reactive power limits in PV buses, provided includes, in addition to , an estimation of the injected reactive power for each PV GMEZ-EXPSITO AND GMEZ-QUILES: FACTORIZED LOAD FLOW 4611 bus. For this reason, the general relationship , rather than , will be used in this section, with . The two steps of the equality-constrained formulation (Section V-A) can then be restated like in the unconstrained case of Section IV-A, as follows: Step 1: Obtain by solving (32) where the gain matrix is in this case (33) A more compact expression is obtained if all products are car- ried out (34) Step 2.1: Initialize by solving (35) where Step 2.2: Starting with , repeatedly solve the following system until convergence: (36) where the matrix is evaluated at On the other hand, the sequential iterative scheme of Section V-B can be replaced by the following procedure, in which Lagrange multipliers are not explicitly computed: Step 1: Obtain by solving (34). Step 2.1: Obtain by solving (35). Step 2.2: Update . If is small enough, then stop. Otherwise go back to Step 1, with . D. Handling Reactive Power Limits in PV Buses Any load ow procedure should consider in practice a number of adjustments so that the solution obtained takes into account the action of control variables and associated limits (see [5, Section 3.7], for a thorough discussion on this issue). Providing a detailed account of how any conceivable solution adjustment can be handled by the factorized formulation pre- sented in this work is clearly beyond a single paper. However, the most basic one, namely the enforcement of reactive power limits in PV buses, will be discussed herein, for which only the sequential solution approach of Section V-B will be considered. As explained above, the state vector comprises all bus voltage magnitudes while the vector of specied quantities contains all PV-bus voltages. Keeping this in mind, let us assume that after the th execution of Step 2 the net reactive power injection at PV bus exceeds one of its limits . Then, the next time Step 1 is performed the specied logarithmic voltage magnitude is replaced in vector by . The opposite is just done when the resulting PQ bus must be reverted to the PV type. Therefore, reactive power limits are checked after Step 2 but enforced in Step 1. Notice that, even though the size of matrix remains constant after a bus-type switching, its nonzero pattern changes when the row corresponding to is replaced by that of (or vice versa). The factorized version based on two weight scales (Section V-C) offers a simpler strategy to accommodate reactive power limits, allowing the structure of matrices and to remain constant throughout the iterative process, as follows: assume that, in addition to the trivial components ( ), we also include in vector an estimate of for each PV bus (initially, in absence of a better value, , but this is updated after each execution of Step 2). This way, the combined measurement vector in (34), composed of both subvectors and , contains all injected powers P&Q (except for the slack bus) as well as all voltage magnitudes, and changing the bus type (from PV to PQ, or vice versa) reduces to exchanging the corresponding element of by the appropriate element of . This can be easily done, without modifying the structure of matrices and , by properly modifying just two coefcients of the weighting matrix . More specically, a component of is converted into a component of by adding to the respective diagonal of , whereas a must be simultaneously added to the component of being shifted to . In summary, the new matrix has the form VI. TEST RESULTS In this section test results corresponding to the following net- works are reported and discussed: IEEE 14-, 118- and 298-bus benchmark systems. 30- and 85-bus radial systems, introduced, respectively, in [16] and [17]. Those systems have been regarded in the literature as ill-conditioned, owing to large R/X ratios and very short and long sections connected to the same node. Large Polish systems (over 2000 buses) corresponding to peak loading conditions, profusely used for benchmarking purposes since they became available in Matpower release [18]. In addition to the conventional NR method in polar form, the proposed factorized schemes are coded in Matlab, taking full advantage of available sparse matrix capabilities. The following acronyms will be used hereinafter for the tested algorithms: 1LkNL: Single execution of Step 1 (linear) followed by iterations of Step 2 (nonlinear), as required until full con- vergence (Section V-A). This iterative scheme is directly 4612 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2013 TABLE I NUMBER OF ITERATIONS FOR BASE CASES adapted from the SE factorized solution proposed else- where. kLkNL: Concatenated execution of Steps 1 and 2 ( itera- tions) until full convergence (Section V-B). This is the new iterative scheme specically developed for the LF problem in this work. A. Convergence Rates for Base Cases The most important check relates to the convergence rate, since any new proposal should compete with the well-known quadratic convergence rate of the NR method. Table I gathers the required number of iterations for two convergence thresh- olds (0.001 and 0.00001). As can be seen, both factorized schemes converge in the same or fewer iterations than those needed by the NR method, the differences being more notice- able for more exigent thresholds. It should be noted that, in 1LkNL method iterations of Step 2 are preceded by a single execution of Step 1, while in kLkNL scheme iterations of both steps are concatenated. This is surely the reason why kLkNL performs better than 1LkNL. The whole iteration numbers in Table I may give the reader the impression that the convergence rate of factorized schemes is very close to that of the NR, which is not actually the case. This is more clearly seen in Fig. 1, where the maximum mis- match vector component is shown for the 298-bus system. Note for instance that, after three iterations, the largest power mis- match for kLkNL scheme is nearly four orders of magnitude smaller than that of the conventional NR method. This more ro- bust behavior is characteristic of both factorized schemes, par- ticularly kLkNL, for all test cases. It is also worth noting that the two radial systems, that were deemed as ill-conditioned in the old times of single-precision arithmetic, are solved without any problem by all methods with todays processors and mathematical packages. B. Convergence Rates for Limit Cases In addition to the base cases reported in Table I, more stressful scenarios are tested in order to conrm the enhanced behavior of the factorized schemes in such cases. For this purpose, all specied powers (i.e., active and reactive power at load buses and active power at generation buses) are multiplied by the max- imum scalar for which the NR method converges from at start, Fig. 1. Convergence prole for 298-bus base (convergence threshold 0.00001). TABLE II NUMBER OF ITERATIONS FOR LIMIT LOAD CASES when reactive power limits are ignored. For each test system, this value is obtained, up to two decimal digits, through a trial- and-error procedure. The results are collected in Table II. For instance, for the 298-bus network, this factor is 1.32 (1.33 gives rise to divergence). In those scenarios, 1LkNL typically saves an iteration whereas kLkNL tends to save two. Fig. 2 is the counterpart of Fig. 1 for this experiment, where it is clearly seen that even though the convergence rate slows down for all methods, the factorized schemes achieve better performance. One more experiment is performed with the 118-bus system, by converting all PV buses (except the slack bus) into equiva- lent PQ buses, with computed from the base-case solution. In this case, both 1LkNL and kLkNL take 4 iterations (i.e., just one more than in the base case) whereas the conventional NR method behaves erratically and fails to converge from at start in 35 iterations (the specied limit), as shown in Fig. 3. When voltage magnitudes at PV buses are initialized to their specied value, convergence is not achieved either. However, if the re- sults obtained after the rst iteration by any of the factorized schemes are used to initialize the NR process, then it converges in three iterations. This proves that the NR method is more sen- sitive to the starting point than factorized methods, probably GMEZ-EXPSITO AND GMEZ-QUILES: FACTORIZED LOAD FLOW 4613 Fig. 2. Convergence prole for the modied 298-bus case with bus powers multiplied by 1.32. Fig. 3. Convergence prole for the modied 118-bus case with PV buses con- verted to PQ buses. owing to the fact that the latter use a redundant set of initial values, including branch variables. C. Reactive Power Limits Enforcement Next, the inuence of many PV buses simultaneously reaching their reactive power limits is assessed. For this pur- pose, the 118-bus system is well tailored, as nearly one half of its buses are voltage regulated ones. Different scenarios are created by replacing the original reactive power limits with symmetrical limits given by , for decreasing values of . This way, as approaches zero all PV buses tend to PQ buses with , eventually leading to infeasible cases. Table III shows the iterations required by both the NR method and the kLkNL factorized scheme, for in the interval 0.80.4 (for no limits are reached whereas leads to an infeasible case), as well as the number of PV buses which are switched to PQ buses in each scenario. As can be seen, the convergence of the NR method is TABLE III NUMBER OF ITERATIONS WITH REACTIVE POWER LIMITS (118-BUS CASE) TABLE IV RUN TIMES (ms) FOR BASE CASES TABLE V RUN TIMES (ms) FOR LIMIT LOAD CASES TABLE VI RUN TIMES (ms) WITH REACTIVE POWER LIMITS (118-BUS CASE) more affected by the bus switching logic, particularly for very exigent convergence thresholds. D. Solution Times Both the polar-coordinates conventional NR and the pro- posed factorized solution schemes have been coded in Matlab (version R2008a) and run under Windows 7 on a 64-bit i5 Intel Core laptop (2.27 GHz, 4 GB of RAM). Tables IVVI provide execution times (in ms) for the sce- narios considered in Tables IIII, respectively. Each value is the average of 100 runs, as individual recorded times are some- what affected by other computer activities. Note that, for the NR method, solution times are of the same order as those obtained with Matpower [18]. 4614 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 28, NO. 4, NOVEMBER 2013 Even though solution times signicantly depend on the computer platform and software environment (C, Java, Matlab, Python, etc.), they can be useful to assess the relative compu- tational cost if similar efforts are made to optimize the code of the procedures involved in the comparison. In view of data shown in Tables IVVI , it can be concluded that the factorized schemes are also computationally competitive compared with the NR method. For the two largest systems, speedups in the range 1.671.85 are obtained with kLkNL scheme for the base-case solutions. Higher speedups (up to 2.3) are achieved in the limit load cases, owing to the additional iteration saving. Considering that the factorized methods involve two steps, the fact that lower solution times are obtained may be counter- intuitive. In addition to the enhanced convergence rate (i.e., less iterations), the following remarks can help explaining those re- sults: Unlike in the NR case, the coefcient matrices involved in the factorized schemes are symmetric (and also positive denite in the reduced formulation based on two weights). Therefore, their symmetry can be fully exploited by using Cholesky factorization (which deals only with upper tri- angular matrices). In fact, when computing gain matrices by carrying out matrix products of the form , al- most half of the computational cost can be saved if this is kept in mind. In the factorized formulations, costly expressions in- volving trigonometric functions do not appear. Except for the trivial Jacobian of the nonlinear functions , all involved matrices are constant. Moreover, the rst linear stage is computationally less expensive for repeated solutions, in which only the right-hand side vector gets modied (this applies to the kLkNL scheme). VII. CONCLUSION This paper extends the factorized solution notion, developed elsewhere for WLS SE, to those cases in which the number of equations exactly matches the number of unknowns, like in the LF problem. This provides a new factorized scheme to solve load ows as a sequence of two WLS problems (the rst one linear and the second nonlinear), fully departing from the well- known NR-based iterative approach. Two iterative schemes are possible in this context, one of them specically designed for the LF case, both of which can be based in practice either on strictly-enforced equality constraints or by means of two weight scales. The latter one is particularly well suited to allow reactive power limits to be easily accom- modated in the iterative process. Several benchmark systems of different sizes have been tested, both in base-case and modied stressful scenarios, in order to assess the convergence pattern and robustness of the proposed schemes. In all tested cases, the two-stage approach reduces either the number of iterations (one or two iterations are frequently saved), or the maximum mismatch vector component after every iteration. A prototype implementation shows that the proposed factorized LF is also computationally competitive. Future efforts will be devoted to investigating the possibility of applying the factorized approach to other power system re- lated problems. 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Gmez-Expsito, Equality-constrained bilinear state estimation, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 902910, May 2012. [15] A. Simoes-Costa and V. H. Quintana, A robust numerical technique for power system state estimation, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-100, no. 2, pp. 691698, Feb. 1981. [16] R. G. Cespedes, New method for the analysis of distribution net- works, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 391396, Jan. 1990. [17] D. Das, D. P. Kothari, and A. Kalam, Simple and efcient method for load ow solution of radial distribution networks, Int. J. Elect. Power Energy Syst., vol. 17, no. 5, pp. 335346, Oct. 1995. [18] [Online]. Available: http://www.pserc.cornell.edu/matpower/. Antonio Gmez-Expsito (F05) received the electrical engineering and doctor degrees from the University of Seville, Spain. He is currently the Endesa Red Industrial Chair Professor at the University of Seville. His primary areas of interest are optimal power system operation, state estimation, digital signal processing and control of exible ac transmission system devices. Catalina Gmez-Quiles (M13) received the engineering degree from the Uni- versity of Seville, Spain, in 2006 and the M.Eng. Degree from McGill Univer- sity, Montreal, QC, Canada, in 2008, both in electrical engineering. In 2012 she received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Seville. Her research interests include mathematical and computer models for power system analysis and risk assessment in competitive electricity markets.