Power system steady state security analysis using vector processing computers

The main difficulties encountered in applying a vector processor to the solution of a power flow is the sparsity of the power flow matrices which results in very short vectors when the nonzero terms are gathered into a packed vector format. The authors describe a steady-state security analysis code which overcomes the problem of very short vectors. The length of the list of outages is the major problem in security analysis since it usually includes at least each individual piece of equipment taken one at a time, and a large number of cases with multiple outages. The use of contingency selection and screening has opened the way to reducing this burden, but a very large number of individual cases must be run to satisfy the need to be sure that no cases have gone unchecked. The efforts described have extended the computational speed with which this can be accomplished, and the implementation of very high performance security analysis codes has been made possible