Voltage stability based contingency ranking using distributed computing environment

In recent years, voltage instability has been responsible for several incidents of major voltage collapses. For stable operation of power system, fast and accurate contingency analysis is required. Voltage stability contingency analysis requires computation of voltage stability margin accurately for each contingency case. This approach is time consuming, particularly in practical power systems where the number of contingencies is very large. This paper proposes a fast and accurate method for contingency ranking using distributed computing. In distributed computing, different parts of a program or the same program may be executed simultaneously on group of computers, which are communicating with each other over a network. The general-purpose computers that are networked can be utilized for distributed computing purpose. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been tested on IEEE 30-bus system. The proposed distributed computing based approach for contingency ranking is found to be computationally efficient and provides near linear speedups.