The role of automatic differentiation in power system analysis

In this paper, automatic differentiation of algorithms is utilized in power system analysis. Automatic differentiation is a computational tool to obtain the derivatives and the value of the function systematically without providing explicit expressions for the derivatives. The method is reliable and produces accurate derivatives instantaneously without the need for hand-coding the derivatives. The method is applied to compute the Jacobian and sensitivities in the continuation power flow. An automatic differentiation package (ADIFOR) that exploits sparsity techniques is used for the application.