Simplified A-Diakoptics for Accelerating QSTS Simulations

Abstract

The spread of distributed energy resources (DERs) across the distribution power system demands complex planning studies based on quasi-static-time-series (QSTS) simulations, requiring a significant amount of computing time to complete, leading planners to look for alternatives to QSTS. Diakoptics based on actors (A-Diakoptics) is a technique for accelerating simulations combining two computing techniques from different engineering fields: diakoptics and the actor model. Diakoptics is a mathematical method for tearing networks, reducing their complexity by using smaller subcircuits that can be solved independently. The actor model is used to coordinate the interaction between these subcircuits and their control actions, given the pervasive inconsistency that can be found when dealing with large-scale models. A-Diakoptics is a technique that simplifies the power flow problem for improving the simulation time performance, leading to faster QSTS simulations. This paper presents a simplified algorithm version of A-Diakoptics for modernizing sequential power simulation tools to use parallel processing. This simplification eliminates critical points found in previous versions of A-Diakoptics, improving the performance of the algorithm and facilitating its implementation to perform QSTS simulations. The performance of the new version of A-Diakoptics is evaluated by its integration into EPRI’s open-source simulator OpenDSS, which uses standard computing architectures and is publicly available.