Electromechanical transients simulation on a multicomputer via the VDHN-Maclaurin method

This paper reports simulations of power systems electromechanical transients on a multicomputer, formulated as a nonlinear algebraic problem by using the time parallelization concept. The bi-factorized inversion, which is the most time consuming stage of the simulation, is solved by the “Very Dishonest Newton (VDHN)-Maclaurin” method, a fully parallel indirect method based on the decomposition of the nonupdated Jacobian matrix. This proposal is made to orient the search for the decomposition based on a sufficient condition for the convergence of the Maclaurin series, which is a desirable situation for the design of more robust algorithms for power system simulation. Such condition keeps a close relation with a physical coupling property exhibited by power systems, and the characteristics of the simulation method. Theoretical and numerical results show that a successful implementation of this method can be better reached when the Jacobian matrix is decomposed as a block diagonal matrix plus a matrix with off diagonal blocks elements, the latter representing weak couplings between the diagonal blocks. The ε Decomposition is used to satisfy the sufficient condition for convergence and the Longest Path Scheduling Method to prevent the uneven loading of processors, permitting to adapt the method in a efficient way on a coarse grain computer. The parallel simulation was written in C language and implemented on a Parsytec PowerXplorer multicomputer. Tests using electromechanical models of the Chilean Central interconnected system and the IEEE300 test system were made to evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of the parallel method