A heuristic algorithm for power-network clustering

An efficient heuristic algorithm for solving cluster problems associated with partitioning of power networks is presented in this paper. The algorithm is divided into two stages. The first stage creates an initial partition based on the electrical distance between system buses. The second stage involves interchanging pairs of buses among the various clusters of the initial partition. The first stage solves the placement problem of n connected buses in an r-dimensional Euclidean space; such a problem is reduced to finding r eigenvectors of a connectivity matrix, defined as the bus admittance matrix. The second stage is based on a node interchange technique. The node interchange is an iterative heuristic method that can be used to improve an initial partition. The method moves one bus at a time, from one cluster of the initial partition to another, in an attempt to maximize the total electrical distance between clusters of the final partition. Applications of the proposed algorithm to both small and medium-size power systems are illustrated in this paper.