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.