EFFICIENT HEURISTIC PARTITIONING ALGORITHM FOR PARALLEL-PROCESSING OFLARGE POWER-SYSTEMS NETWORK EQUATIONS

An efficient heuristic algorithm for automatic partitioning of a power system network is presented. The algorithm was designed to be used in conjunction with a diakoptics-based coarse grain parallel method for solving large, sparse linear systems arising from network analysis. It exploits the techniques of factorisation path graph partitioning and equivalent post-ordering. Test results for systems up to 811 busbars a nd 1476 transmission lines are included for comparison purposes. This indicates that the method is able to divide a power system network mod el into a number of equal sized subnetworks in order to optimise the u se of parallel computer systems for network analysis while the resulta nt number of fill-in elements is kept to a minimum.