Design of generic direct sparse linear system solver in C++ for power system analysis

This paper presents design of generic linear system solver (LSS) for a class of large sparse symmetric matrices over real and complex numbers. These matrices correspond to either of the following: (1) symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices, (2) complex Hermitian matrices, (3) complex matrices with SPD real and imaginary matrices. Such matrices arise in various power system analysis applications like load flow analysis and short circuit analysis. Template facility of C++ is used to write a generic program on float, double and complex data types. Design of algorithm guarantees numerical stability and efficient sparsity implementation. A reusable class SET is defined to cater to graph theoretic computations. LSS problems with matrices up to 20000 nodes have been tested. Another feature of the proposed LSS is implementation of associative array, which allows subscripting an array with character strings, such as bus names. This helps in making the power system analysis software user friendly. The proposed LSS reflects an important development toward a truly object oriented power system analysis software.