Intentional islanding of electric power systems in a grid computing framework: A graph-theoretic approach

Incorporation of deregulation and increase in renewable sources of generation has changed the nature of existing electric power systems to a more geographically distributed system. This had led to significant challenges towards on-line monitoring and control. Contingency set identification is an essential step in monitoring the power system security level since outage of a few among the combinatorially huge number of power distribution lines can lead to a catastrophe, even blackouts. Intentional islanding is a counter approach. The most critical criterion in intentional islanding is to minimize the real power imbalance within the islands to benefit subsequent restoration. Grid computing is being seen as a viable solution to cater to the changing needs of data-intensive computing, including monitoring and control of power systems. In this paper, a grid service for intentional islanding for power systems protection has been developed and demonstrated on a test bed using IEEE 30 bus test system as a case study. Grid gain 2.0 has been employed as middleware to setup the test bed.