Vector computer implementation of power flow outage studies

The authors present an application of vector and parallel processing to power flow outage studies on large-scale networks. In order to improve computational efficiency, the operations required to perform both the forward/backward solution and the power residual calculation are gathered in the form of long FORTRAN DO loops. Two algorithms are proposed, and results are compared with the results of a program written for scalar processing. Simulations for the outage studies on IEEE standard networks and some different configurations of Italian and European EHV systems were run on a CRAY Y-MP8/432 vector computer (and partially on a IBM 3090/200S VF). The multitasking facility of the CRAY computer was also exploited in order to shorten the wall clock time required by a complete outage simulation