Fine-Grained Fully Parallel Power Flow Calculation by Incorporating BBDF Method Into a Multistep NR Algorithm

In recognizing urgent needs in fast calculation of AC power flow (PF) problems, PF computation has been explored under different parallel computing platforms. Specifically, a block-bordered-diagonal form (BBDF) method has been widely studied to permute linear equations in PF calculations into a BBDF form for facilitating parallel computation. However, determining an optimal network segmentation scheme that leads to the best speedup ratio of BBDF-based parallel PF is challenging. As a first contribution, this paper proposes a node-tearing-based approach to determine the optimal network segmentation scheme, which leverages sizes of subnetworks and the coordination network to achieve the best speedup ratio of BBDF-based parallel PF calculation. In addition, a fine-grained fully parallel PF approach is proposed to further enhance parallel performance, in which all three key steps of the Newton–Raphson based PF calculation are implemented in parallel. Studies illustrate effectiveness of the proposed network segmentation method and the fully parallel PF approach.