Towards faster branch outage simulations using simulated annealing and parallel programming

Contingency studies such as branch outage and generator outage are among important studies of energy management centers operations. Branch outage modeling, on the other hand, is one of the basic steps of post-outage state estimation of an electrical power system. Real time implementation of the problem brings the necessity of using high speed methods while providing a reasonable accuracy. This paper presents simulated annealing based solution of the branch outage event, which is formulated as a local optimization problem. To speed up the solution procedure, the distributed computing toolbox of Matlab is used as a parallel programming tool. The results of the proposed method are compared to those of full AC method and are discussed both from the point of accuracy and solution speed.