A parallel transient stability simulation for power systems

As power systems continue to develop, online dynamic security analysis and real-time simulation using parallel computing are becoming increasingly important. This paper presents a novel multilevel partition scheme for parallel computing based on power network regional characteristics and describes the design and implementation of a hierarchical block bordered diagonal form (BBDF) algorithm for power network computation. Some optimization schemes are further proposed to reduce the computation and communication time and to improve the scalability of the program. The simulation results show that, for a large network with 2115 nodes, 2614 branches, 248 generators, and 544 loads, the proposed algorithms and schemes run ten times faster on a cluster system with eight CPUs than on a single CPU. Thus, they satisfy the real-time simulation requirement for large-scale power grids.