Network Connectivity Identification Method based on Incidence Matrix and Branch Pointer Vector

Network connectivity identification is an important issue of topology analysis. Regarding how to identify the connected components in large-scale power systems, a new network connectivity identification method based on incidence matrix and branch pointer vector is proposed in this paper. By compressing the incidence matrix and updating the branch pointer vector, the method realizes connected component identification without massive calculation of graph search and logical operation. Details of the method are presented and a simplified nine node case is used for further illustration. Comparison tests between the proposed method and the traditional method based on graph search are carried out on several large-scale test cases with hundreds to tens of thousands nodes. Simulation results demonstrate good performance of the proposed method in dealing with large-scale network especially that with multi-connected components.