Parallel contingency analysis using differential evolution based solution for branch outage problem

Contingency analysis is one of the most fundamental work an electricity management center operator has to perform regularly. If both bus voltage magnitudes and reactive power flowing on the branches during any type of outages are within the acceptable limits, the system is called secure. In this paper we solve the contingency problem using a recently developed local constrained optimization based branch outage problem. The optimization problem resulted from the formulation of branch outage is solved by differential evolution method. Using Matlab's parallel computing toolbox, contingency analysis for IEEE 300 test system is performed and the results are presented. The study shows that it is straight forward to implement contingency analysis on the Matlab's parallel environment and obtain near linear speedups.