Abstract
In order to obtain an accurate state estimation of the operation in the combined heat and power system, it is necessary to carry out state estimation. Due to the limited information sharing among various energy systems, it is practical to perform state estimation in a decentralized manner. However, the possible communication packet loss is seldomly considered among various energy systems. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a relaxed alternating direction method of multiplier algorithm. It can also improve the computation efficiency compared with the conventional alternating direction of the multiplier algorithm. Case studies of two test systems are carried out to show the validity and superiority of the proposed algorithm.
Keywords
Alternating direction of multiplier algorithm; combined heat and power system; communication packet loss; decentralized optimization; state estimation
WITH the increasing pressure from energy and environmental protection, the energy utilization efficiency is improved recently, which has promoted the transformation from the conventional single energy system to the integrated energy system (IES) with the harmonization of multi-energy [
The energy management is based on the system operation states. In order to obtain an accurate estimate of the operation states in CHPS, it is necessary to perform state estimation (SE). SE is based on the measurement data from metering devices. Due to the measurement incompleteness and the random measurement error of metering devices, SE is an important part of the monitoring and operation of the system. SE of EPSs and DHNs is widely investigated [
In the above literatures, SE is carried out in a centralized or a decentralized manner. However, it is noteworthy that different energy systems are operated by different energy system operators. The measurement information among different energy systems cannot be shared fully due to the privacy protection and the communication unreliability among different subsystems. Thus, the decentralized solution strategy is more practical for SE in CHPS.
The decentralized solution strategy decomposes the primal optimization problem into several subproblems. In terms of subproblem solutions, the decentralized optimization techniques can be divided into two categories [
Although the decentralized SE algorithms mainly focus on the practicability and validity, the possible communication failures among different subsystems are randomly considered. Recently, the communication failures have been gaining a lot of attention because of their negative effects on the operation of EPSs [
1) An R-ADMM algorithm is developed for the decentralized SE of the CHPS. The algorithm shows faster convergence rates than the conventional ADMM algorithm, and it improves the commutation efficiency of the decentralized solving procedure.
2) The robust implementation of the R-ADMM algorithm is proposed considering communication failures among different subsystems. The algorithm can still converge and maintain great computation efficiency with high probability of packet loss, which reflects its robustness.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II provides SE formulation of CHPS. Section III presents the R-ADMM algorithm. Section IV presents the case study. Section V draws the conclusions and suggests the future works.
In this section, the SE problem for CHPS is formulated. The structure of an exemplary CHPS is shown in

Fig. 1 Structure of an exemplary CHPS.
The formulation of SE for CHPS [
Weighted least squares (WLS) is widely used for SE. The objective function based on WLS criterion is to minimize the weighted sum of squares of the measurement residuals. Therefore, the objective function of the SE in the EPS is expressed as:
(1) |
where is the bus voltage magnitude; is the bus voltage phase angle; are the power injections; is the voltage magnitude; is the weight coefficient of the measurement of voltage magnitude; , are the weight coefficients of the measurement of active and reactive power injections, respectively; is the index set of measurements of voltage magnitude; and , are the index sets of measurements of active and reactive power injections, respectively. In this paper, the variables with a tilde above them represent measurements of those variables and the corresponding variables without a tilde above them represent the estimated values.
The constraints are the measurement equations that establish the relationship between the measurements and the state variables. For the EPS, the power injection equations are shown as:
(2) |
(3) |
where are the active and reactive power injections at bus i in period t, respectively; is the element of the conductance matrix; is the element of the susceptance matrix; is the index set of buses in the EPS; and is the index set of time periods.
The weighted sum of squares of the measurement residuals for DHN is minimized as:
(4) |
where is the water pressure; is the mass flow rate; is the heat power; is the temperature; , , , are the index sets of pressure measurements, mass flow rate measurements, heat power measurements, and temperature measurements, respectively; and are the weight coefficients of the measurements of the pressure, mass flow rate, heat power, and temperature, respectively. , , , and are the decision variables.
The constraints in DHN depict the relationship among the decision variables above. They are given below.
1) Continuity of mass flow: the mass flow that enters into a node is equal to the mass flow leaves the node. The constraint is expressed as:
(5) |
where are the index sets of pipelines that end at the node and start from the node, respectively; is the mass flow rate of pipeline b in period t; and is the index set of the nodes in the DHN.
2) Head loss: head loss is the pressure change due to the pipeline friction. The relation between the mass flow and the head losses along each pipeline is:
(6) |
where are the pressures at the inlet and outlet of pipeline b in period t, respectively; is the pressure loss coefficient of a pipeline; and is the index set of pipelines in the DHN.
3) Heat power: the heat power at a load node or a source node is determined by the mass flow rates and the temperature changes, expressed by:
(7) |
(8) |
where are the heat power supplied to load node and heat source in period t, respectively; is the specific heat capacity of water; are the mass flow rates entering/exiting load node i and source node i in period t, respectively; are the temperatures of the mass flow entering load node i and exiting load node i in period t, respectively; , are the temperatures of the mass flow entering source node i and exiting source node i in period t, respectively; and are the index sets of loads and CHP units in the DHN, respectively.
4) Mixing temperature: for the temperature of the mass flow leaving a node with more than one pipeline, the mixing temperature is given as:
(9) |
where is the temperature of the mass flow at the outlet of pipeline b in period t considering the heat loss; and is the mixing temperature at node i in period t.
The inlet temperature of mass flow is equal to the mixing temperature at the node as:
(10) |
where is the temperature of the mass flow at the inlet of pipeline b in period t considering the heat loss.
5) Heat dynamics and heat loss: in the pipeline, the outlet temperature responds to the inlet temperature with the time delays [
As shown in

Fig. 2 Vertical section of a pipeline in DHN.
It can be estimated by a number of historical inlet temperatures and the corresponding time-delay coefficients as follows:
(11) |
where are the indexes of the last period whose water mass flows out of the pipeline before the end of period and , respectively; and is the time-delay coefficient. These variables are determined by the pipeline parameters and the mass flow rate as:
(12) |
(13) |
(14) |
where is the density of water; is the total mass flowing into the pipeline from the time to , as shown in
(15) |
(16) |
Besides, the outlet temperature considering the heat loss is calculated as:
(17) |
where is the ambient temperature in period t; and is the heat transfer coefficient of pipeline b.
SE formulation of CHPS consists of the EPS SE problems, DHN SE problems and the coupling constraints between EPSs and DHNs. Therefore, SE formulation of CHPS can be expressed as:
(18) |
s.t.
(19) |
(20) |
(21) |
where includes ; includes ; are the incidence matrices, e.g., reflects the relation between and ; , are the index sets of the neighboring areas of the areas i and j, respectively; and are the index sets of DHN and EPS areas, respectively.
(22) |
where is the heat-to-power ratio of the CHP unit.
The conventional ADMM algorithm has slow convergence rate, and it needs much time to converge when the communication failures occur. To address this problem, the R-ADMM algorithm is adopted in this paper. It has faster convergence rate than ADMM, and the computation efficiency is improved under the situations of communication failures.
The R-ADMM algorithm is derived using the relaxed Peaceman-Rachford splitting (R-PRS) to the Lagrangian dual problem [
For the two-area optimization problem, the formulation can be expressed as:
(23) |
By applying the R-PRS to the Lagrangian dual of (23), the variables can be computed as [
(24) |
(25) |
(26) |
(27) |
(28) |
where , are the solutions of the primal problem in the
For (28), the special cases with and are called the Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRS) and PRS algorithms, respectively. When , i.e., the DRS is applied to the Lagrangian dual of the primal problem, the R-ADMM algorithm is recovered from the conventional ADMM algorithm [
However, the SE formulation (18)-(21) is a general multi-area optimization problem rather than a two-area one. The R-ADMM algorithm cannot be applied in the SE problem directly. We use the method in [
Define , where is the number of EPS areas and is the number of DHN areas. Define as the feasible region of CHPS, where satisfy the constraints (19)-(21). Introduce the bridge variable , where is the boundary information of each area, i.e., .
Therefore, SE formulation can be reformulated as:
(29) |
where is the incidence matrix reflecting the relation between the boundary information and primal variable ; and is the permutation matrix, which swaps the EPS boundary information with the DHN boundary information in according to (21).
Introduce the indicator function which is equal to 0 if and otherwise. Then the SE formulation is rewritten as:
(30) |
The formulation (30) is similar to (23). By applying the (24)-(28) to the Lagrange dual of (30), the variable can be updated iteratively in the following way:
(31) |
(32) |
Equations
(33) |
(34) |
(35) |
where is the auxiliary variable in the objective function of the EPS area subproblem, which is updated based on the auxiliary variable ; and is the boundary information sending from the DHN area to the EPS area.
For the DHN subproblem, we can obtain:
(36) |
(37) |
(38) |
where is the boundary information sending from the EPS area to the DHN area.
The communication procedure between the EPS area and the DHN area is presented in

Fig. 3 Communication procedure between neighboring areas.
The algorithm stops when the primal residual and the dual residual are smaller than their corresponding tolerances:
(39) |
where , are the primal residual and dual residual during the
For the convex optimization problem, the optimal solution of the Lagrangian dual problem is equal to that of the primal problem. With and , the proposed algorithm can converge to its global optimal solution [
Considering the instability or potential malfunction of the communication channels, one area may not receive the boundary information from its neighboring areas by chance. This situation is considered as the communication packet loss, and the probability of packet loss occurs as the packet loss probability.
Assume that the packet loss probability from area to area is equal to , we can obtain:
(40) |
where if the packet transmitted by the area to the area is lost, and otherwise.
For the auxiliary variable , if the area receives the boundary information from the area , the variable is updated using the received boundary information. Otherwise, its value is not changed. The detailed expression is:
(41) |
The convergence performance of the algorithm working in the lossy scenarios can be found in [
In the process of solving SE for CHPS, it is noteworthy that the heat dynamic constraints (11)-(17) cannot be handled readily. We use the alternating estimation method in [
By combining this alternating strategy and the R-ADMM algorithm, the calculation process of SE for CHPS is presented in

Fig. 4 Procedure of R-ADMM of SE for CHPS.
Step 1: initialize the state variables. Set the index of iteration .
Step 2: solve the SE problem for each EPS area (33) and each DHN area (36) using the alternating estimation strategy described above.
Step 3: calculate the boundary information according to (35) or (38) for each subsystem and transmit it to the neighboring area.
Step 4: update the auxiliary variables based on the communication situation using (41) for each subsystem.
Step 5: if the termination criterion (39) is met, stop the algorithm. Otherwise, set the number of iterations as and return to the Step 2.
Two numerical simulations are conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed algorithm. Case 1 is a CHPS with a 9-bus EPS and a 6-node DHN. EPS is connected to DHN through a CHP unit at bus 3. Case 2 is a CHPS with a 118-bus EPS, an 8-node DHN and a 45-node DHN. EPS is connected to DHNs through the CHP units at bus 12 and bus 54. The detailed information on the above cases can be found in [
The measurement errors are simulated as independent zero-mean Gaussian distribution with the standard deviation of 1% of the measurement ranges of each metering device. The weight coefficients used in the objective function are calculated based on the standard deviations of the corresponding measurements. The probability distribution of packet losses is according to (40). The parameters are set for the R-ADMM algorithm by the default. The variables are initialized using their measurement data. According to [
(42) |
All tests are performed on a computer with four processors running at 1.8 GHz and 16 GB of RAM. All the optimization problems are solved with the commercial solver IPOPT 3.12.9 [
In this sub-section, we study the performance of the proposed algorithm with the low packet loss probability. For the reliable communication, the packet loss probability is low. The packet loss probability is set as 0.05 for each area [
We analyze the accuracy of the proposed algorithm with a performance metric [
(43) |
(44) |
where is the estimation result; is the measurement data; is the actual operation data; and is the weight coefficient.
A smaller value of indicates a greater improvement from the measurement states to the estimation states, which implies higher quality of SE result. values of the R-ADMM results for Case 1 and Case 2 are presented in Figs.

Fig. 5 values for R-ADMM results in Case 1.

Fig. 6 values for R-ADMM results in Case 2.
For the whole CHPS, the values of Case 1 ranges from 43.66% to 48.91%, and the values of Case 2 ranges from 50.58% to 56.48%. These results show that the R-ADMM can greatly improve the accuracy of the measurement data.
To further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we compare the SE solutions between the R-ADMM and the centralized SE (CSE) algorithm. 500 SE tests are carried out using these algorithms on the same measurement data for each period. The mean values of the relative errors (MREs) of the R-ADMM algorithm for Case 1 and Case 2 are presented in Tables I and II, respectively. As shown in these tables, the order of MREs of the R-ADMM algorithm is less than 1×1
To study the computation efficiency of R-ADMM, an SE test is carried out using the R-ADMM with different relaxation parameters on the same measurement data. The comparisons of the results of different algorithms for Case 1 and Case 2 are listed in Tables III and IV, respectively. The fourth column of these tables shows the MREs of the state variables between the CSE algorithm and the decentralized algorithms.
SE problem is a non-convex optimization problem. Different values of relaxation parameter for R-ADMM result in differences in the auxiliary variables of their objective functions in each iteration, which may lead to different local optima [
Because R-ADMM needs iterations to reach the termination criterion, the computation time of R-ADMM is longer than that of the CSE algorithm. The advantage of the R-ADMM over the centralized algorithm mainly depends on its practicality. In the actual production process, different energy systems are operated by different energy system operators independently. The measurement information among different energy systems cannot be shared fully due to the privacy protection. Therefore, it is impractical to gather all measurement information in a centralized manner. While the R-ADMM can guarantee the independent operation and the coupled results in a decentralized manner in this situation.
The evolution of primal residuals and dual residuals in Cases 1 and 2 are shown in Figs.

Fig. 7 Evolution of residuals with different in Case 1. (a) Primal residual. (b) Dual residual.

Fig. 8 The evolution of residuals with different in Case 2. (a) Primal residual. (b) Dual residual.
When [
To study the performance of the R-ADMM with high packet loss probability, we compare three scenarios with different packet loss probabilities for each case. The parameters are set for the R-ADMM algorithm. The measurement data are set the same for each scenario. The 500 Monte Carlo experiments are conducted to simulate the random packet loss among the neighboring areas for each scenario. The comparison of different algorithms in different scenarios for Cases 1 and 2 are listed in Tables V and VI, respectively. The third column of these tables shows the MREs of the state variables between the scenario of the high packet loss probability ( or ) with that of the low packet loss probability () for the same algorithm.
As shown in the fourth and fifth columns in Tables V and VI, a high packet loss probability will lead to a minor change of the SE result and a long computation time. When the communication packet is lost, the auxiliary variables used in the objective function during the next iteration cannot be updated. These “out-of-date” auxiliary variables will affect the accuracy of SE and reduce the computation efficiency.
As shown in the third column in Tables V and VI, the changes of the state variables among the scenarios of different packet loss probabilities with R-ADMM are smaller than those of the ADMM. As shown in the fourth column of Tables V and VI, the increased computation time under the high packet loss probability with R-ADMM are much smaller than that with ADMM. The influences of the high packet loss probability on R-ADMM is smaller than those on ADMM, which shows greater robustness of the proposed algorithm.
The packet loss probabilities for different sub-systems are set to different values in Case 2 (118-bus EPS (EPS1)), as shown in Table VII. represents the packet loss probability sending from area to area .
In the simulations, R-ADMM meets the convergence criterion with a value of 50.3136% in 11.8584 s, the ADMM meets the convergence criterion with a value of 50.3163% in 35.9279 s. The evolution of the primal residuals and the dual residuals for ADMM and R-ADMM are depicted in Figs.

Fig. 9 Evolution of residuals with iterations of ADMM.

Fig. 10 Evolution of residuals with iterations of R-ADMM.
This paper proposes a decentralized solution for SE of CHPS. An R-ADMM algorithm is developed based on the boundary information communication among the neighboring areas. In addition, the robust implementation of the R-ADMM algorithm considering the communication failures among different sub-systems is proposed. Case studies show that the proposed algorithm can yield reasonable SE results with great computation efficiency and robustness. In future work, the additional functionalities will be incorporated into the proposed algorithm such as observability analysis and bad data detection and identification. In addition, more differences among various energy measurement systems will be considered such as different sample rates and different sample instant.
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