Grid-processing for optimization based design of power electronic equipment using electromagnetic transient simulation

This paper presents a grid-processing approach that interfaces optimization algorithms with electromagnetic transients (EMT) simulations programs to significantly speed up the design of power apparatus and networks. A parallel gradient-based optimization algorithm feeds trial parameters to an EMT simulator to determine the optimal parameters. The considerable parallelism in the algorithm is exploited to construct a grid-processing based implementation. The paper discusses the methodology and compares the speedup gained over the conventional sequential approach. The results indicate that the approach is promising, with the speedup being often an order of magnitude or more.