In modeling battery energy storage systems (BESS) in power systems, binary variables are used to represent the complementary nature of charging and discharging. A conventional approach for these BESS optimization problems is to relax binary variables and convert the problem into a linear program. However, such linear programming relaxation models can yield unrealistic fractional solutions, such as simultaneous charging and discharging. In this paper, we develop a regularized mixed-integer programming (MIP) model for the optimal power flow (OPF) problem with BESS. We prove that, under mild conditions, the proposed regularized model admits a zero integrality gap with its linear programming relaxation; hence, it can be solved efficiently. By studying the properties of the regularized MIP model, we show that its optimal solution is also near optimal to the original OPF problem with BESS, thereby providing a valid and tight upper bound for the OPF problem with BESS. The use of the regularized MIP model allows us to solve a trilevel [Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text]-[Formula: see text] network contingency problem, which is otherwise intractable to solve. History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Discrete. Funding: N. Jiang (as a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology) and W. Xie were supported in part by the National Science Foundation [Grant 2246414] and the Office of Naval Research [Grant N00014-24-1-2066]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2024.0771 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2024.0771 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

Abstract In this paper, we study the strength of convex relaxations obtained by convexification of aggregation of constraints for a set S described by two bilinear bipartite equalities. Aggregation is the process of rescaling the original constraints by scalar weights and adding the scaled constraints together. It is natural to study the aggregation technique as it yields a single bilinear bipartite equality whose convex hull is already understood from previous literature. On the theoretical side, we present sufficient conditions when $$\text {conv} (S)$$ conv ( S ) can be described by the intersection of convex hulls of a finite number of aggregations, examples when $$\text {conv} (S)$$ conv ( S ) can only be obtained as the intersection of the convex hull of an infinite number of aggregations, and examples when $$\text {conv} (S)$$ conv ( S ) cannot be achieved exactly from the process of aggregation. Computationally, we explore different methods to derive aggregation weights in order to obtain tight convex relaxations. We show that even if an exact convex hull may not be achieved using aggregations, including the convex hull of an aggregation often significantly tightens the outer approximation of $$\text {conv} (S)$$ conv ( S ) . Finally, we apply the aggregation method to obtain convex relaxation for the structural model updating problem and show that this yields better bounds within a branch-and-bound tree as compared to not using aggregations.