Recursion based contingency analysis of an electrical power system

Large computational load is one of the key issues of an electrical power system security analysis. Currently, most of the researchers are trying to find out how to reduce the computational load. The contingency analysis is one of the most promising approaches for solving the problem. In fact, there are several ways to improve the effectiveness of the contingency analysis. The first way is to reduce the number of simulated situations via contingency searching or contingency screening. Another way is to increase the efficiency of power flow computations. This paper presents a novel recursion-based approach for solving the contingency analysis problem. The approach improves the effectiveness of the contingency analysis by the above-mentioned ways. It relies on a specific contingency sorting procedure based on the recursive call of the calculating procedure. The proposed approach has been tested on the 14-bus IEEE test system. The results obtained show almost a twofold increase in the computational efficiency in comparison with the conventional contingency sorting procedure.