Slow coherency and Angle Modulated Particle Swarm Optimization based islanding of large-scale power systems

Power system islanding is an effective way to avoid catastrophic wide area blackouts, such as the 2003 North American Blackout. Islanding of large-scale power systems is a combinatorial explosion problem. Thus, it is very difficult to find an optimal solution within reasonable time using analytical methods. This paper presents a new method to solve this problem. In the proposed method, Angle Modulated Particle Swarm Optimization (AMPSO) is utilized to find islanding Solutions for large-scale power systems due to its high computational efficiency. First, desired generator groups are obtained using the slow coherency algorithm. AMPSO is then used to optimize a fitness function defined according to both generation/load balance and similarity to the desired generator grouping. In doing so, the resulting islanding solutions provide good static and dynamic stability. Simulations of power systems of different scales demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.