The recent requirement for faster and more frequent solutions has encouraged the consideration of parallel implementations using decentralized processors. Distributed multi-processor environments can potentially greatly increase the available computational capacity and decrease the communication burden, allowing for faster Optimal Power Flow (OPF) solutions. This paper presents a mathematical approach to implementing distributed OPF using the alternating direction method (ADM) to parallelize the OPF. Several IEEE Reliability Test Systems were adopted to demonstrate the proposed algorithm.