Fast power flow for radial power systems using parallel processing

Power flow calculation is a basic tool for power system planning and control which includes power flow analysis, voltage control, service restoration, network reconfiguration, and other operation functions for control centers. In these applications, it is very important to solve the power flow problem as efficiently as possible. This paper presents a fast power flow using parallel processing for radial power systems. This method can be applied to secondary systems and distribution systems. Since it uses as state variables only active and reactive power injection to main lines and laterals, reduction of the number of state variables can be realized. Radical networks are mapped to the tree structure of parallel processor systems in the proposed method. The forward/ backward sweep approach is realized by communication from a root processor to leaf processors and vice versa. Using the mapping scheme of the proposed method, each processor has to communicate with only neighboring processors. The proposed method is evaluated on various radial systems with promising results.