Soft-error resiliency of power flow calculations

This paper develops a model to show the effects of soft errors on power flow calculations. We create artificial bit-flips and apply them to solve linear equations obtained in Fast Decoupled Load Flow (FDLF) method. With this, we aim to represent the sensitivity of FDLF iteration against soft errors with a statistical view by using different numerical fault injection scenarios. The study focuses on the soft-error sensitivity of the FDLF method with exact (LU) linear solvers. We performed approximately 60000 experiments on IEEE 14, 30, 57, 118 test systems to examine the soft-error resiliency of FDLF method. Statistical study shows that even for small systems, soft-errors may have large impacts on the convergence of the FDLF. Hence, an improvement should be provided against soft errors in power flow studies to obtain more efficient and reliable simulations in near future exascale computational environments.