A two-stage flow-based partition framework for unbalanced distribution networks

Multiarea parallel computing has emerged as a powerful tool for improving operation and control efficiency in the context of the expanding scale of new power systems. However, the existing partitioning methods cannot handle the problem of three-phase imbalance, the results are not stable enough and have not been verified in large-scale distribution networks. Driven by this motivation, this paper presents a two-stage algorithm that can be applied to large-scale distribution networks to produce non-overlapping and overlapping zoning results. The algorithm is split into two sections: sketchy partitioning and multi-region merging. The voltage/admittance matrix must first be used to determine the electrical distance between nodes. Utilize the Louvain algorithm to obtain the result of the coarse partition. The flow algorithm or the hierarchical flow method is then employed, depending on the limitations of the number of partitions, to obtain sub-regions with comparable scales. Finally, IEEE 123-node test feeder and IEEE 8500-node test feeder are used to validate the algorithm. Simulation results and comparisons show that the proposed partition algorithm can produce more reliable and efficient partition results by contrast with these existing methods, in the case of unbalanced three-phase and large-scale distribution networks.