Researchers Savvas Panagi, Chrysovalantis Spanias, and Petros Aristidou from the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Cyprus have developed a new framework to optimize the management of active distribution networks, which are increasingly integrating electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps (HPs). Their work, published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, addresses the challenges posed by the growing electrification of transportation and heating.
The researchers propose a unified framework that combines a building thermal model with a network-constrained optimal power flow (OPF) to jointly optimize the operation of EVs, HPs, and photovoltaic systems. This approach considers the coupled thermal-electrical dynamics introduced by these resources and ensures that thermal comfort, distributed energy resource limits, and full power flow physics are explicitly enforced.
To make the framework computationally efficient, the researchers evaluated Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP) relaxations on a realistic low-voltage feeder. They found that despite some theoretical exactness conditions not being met due to network heterogeneity, the relaxation remained exact in practice. Additionally, they compared different formulations—convex DistFlow, bus injection, and branch flow—and discovered that convex DistFlow achieved near-optimal performance with sub-second runtimes, even at high distributed energy resource penetration levels.
Simulations demonstrated the effectiveness of coordinated scheduling, resulting in significant improvements. The framework achieved a 41% reduction in transformer aging, a 54% reduction in losses, and completely eliminated voltage violations. These findings highlight the value of integrated thermal-electrical coordination in future smart grids, offering practical applications for the energy sector to enhance the efficiency and reliability of distribution networks.
The research was published in the IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, a leading journal in the field of power and energy systems.
This article is based on research available at arXiv.