Development of islanding early warning mechanism for power systems

This paper discusses a computer algorithm which can be used to detect the conditions that will separate the power system into two or more islands. In order to provide an early warning mechanism for the dispatchers in the control center such that some actions can be taken before an islanding condition occurs, the proposed algorithm converts the power system topology into an undirected graph first. Based on the graph theory, the algorithm will indicate that outages occur on one or more of the transmission lines will lead to an islanding situation. The Tai-Power Company 345 kV and 161 kV systems will be used to validate the algorithm and evaluate the performance.