Relaxation-based real-time transient stability simulation on distributed hardware

Real-time transient stability simulation is of paramount importance for system security assessment and to initiate preventive control actions before catastrophic events such as blackouts happen. Transient stability simulation of realistic-size power systems involves the solution of a large set of non-linear differential-algebraic equations in the time-domain which requires significant computational resources. Exploitation of parallel processing techniques can provide an efficient and cost-effective solution to this problem. This paper proposes a fully parallel method known as instantaneous relaxation (IR) for real-time transient stability simulation. To validate and evaluate the proposed method a test system has been implemented on a distributed PC-Cluster based real-time simulator. A comparison of the captured real-time results with those from the PSS/E software shows high accuracy.