AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHM TO LOCATE ALL THE LOAD FLOW SOLUTIONS

A novel, numerically efficient algorithm to find all the solutions to load flow equations is presented in this paper. This algorithm is base d on the analysis of the topological structures of the solution set de fined by the parameterized load flow equation. It is found that the lo ad flow solutions are connected by one-dimension manifolds (curves) to form a connected graph. All the load flow solutions can be found by t racing these curves. The significance of this algorithm is that it can be guaranteed to find all the solutions while reducing the amount of computations to the point that this task can be attempted on real powe r systems. Results on two example systems are provided to demonstrate the numerical performances of the algorithm and to provide a compariso n with the currently available method.