Toward on-line system splitting method for emergency control with priority service areas

System splitting is an efficient way to prevent widespread blackout. Finding proper splitting schemes for on-line application is becoming increasingly difficult due to the combinatorial explosion nature of the problem. This paper considers a new problem formulation of system splitting with priority service areas and proposes an efficient three-stage method for designing on-line system splitting. These three stages are composed of the stage of screening, ranking and detailed analysis. A time-domain stability check is embedded in the detailed analysis stage to ensure the validity of the system splitting scheme developed by the proposed method. A spanning tree algorithm is used in the screening stage to provide multiple system splitting schemes. The proposed 3-stage method is evaluated on the IEEE 30- and 118-bus test systems to show that the proposed method is computationally efficient and effective.