A parallel processing approach to dynamic simulations of combined transmission and distribution systems

Simulating a power system with both transmission and distribution networks modeled in detail is a huge computational challenge. In this paper, a Schur-complement-based domain decomposition algorithm is proposed to provide accurate, detailed dynamic simulations of such systems. The simulation procedure is accelerated with the use of parallel programming techniques, taking advantage of the parallelization opportunities inherent to domain decomposition algorithms. The proposed algorithm is general, portable and scalable on inexpensive, shared-memory, multi-core machines. A large-scale test system is used for its performance evaluation.