A User Friendly Simulation Tool for Power Flow and Tracing Analysis

Deregulation in power industry necessitates wide access to transmission networks that connect consumers and suppliers. However, trend towards increasing transmission open access makes the current power systems very complex and require additional information to operate the system more efficiently. Therefore it is vital to develop improved tools to obtain the required data and communicate effectively with system participants. This paper presents a user friendly power system simulation environment in Matlab called PTrack. PTrack is a free software package available on request to authors and can be used for educational and research purposes. Using PTrack, one can perform load flow and power flow tracing analysis with minimal amount of training. Power flow tracing module available in PTrack is a novelty among the open source Matlab-based packages. It is particularly effective in providing user with intuitive information about the behavior of system participants in deregulated environment. IEEE 9-bus test system has been utilized to illustrate the capabilities and effectiveness of the tool.