Unified Numerical Stability and Accuracy Analysis of the Partitioned-Solution Approach

This article focuses on the Partitioned-Solution Approach (PSA) employed for the Time-Domain Simulation (TDS) of dynamic power system models. In PSA, differential equations are solved at each step of the TDS for state variables, whereas algebraic equations are solved separately. The goal of this article is to propose a novel, matrix-pencil based technique to study numerical stability and accuracy of PSA in a unified way. The proposed technique quantifies the numerical deformation that PSA-based methods introduce to the dynamics of the power system model, and allows estimating useful upper time step bounds that achieve prescribed simulation accuracy criteria. The family of Predictor-Corrector (PC) methods, which is commonly applied in practical implementations of PSA, is utilized to illustrate the proposed technique. Simulations are carried out on the IEEE 39-bus system, as well as on a 1479-bus model of the All-Island Irish Transmission System (AIITS).