Pervasive Grid for Large-Scale Power Systems Contingency Analysis

Optimal control and management of power systemsrequire extensive analyses of phenomena that can compromisetheir operation in order to evaluate their impact on the securityand reliability levels of the electrical networks. For complexnetworks, this process, known as power systems contingenciesanalysis, requires large computational efforts, whereas computationtimes should be less than a few minutes for the informationto be useful.Even though many architectures based on conventional paralleland distributed systems have been widely proposed in the literature,they are characterized by low extensibility, reusability, andscalability, and so, they require a sensible hardware upgrade whenmore computational resources are necessary.This event is not infrequent in power systems where the constantgrowth of the electrical network complexity and the need for largersecurity and reliability levels of the plant infrastructures lead to theneed of more detailed contingency analysis in shorter times.To address this problem, this paper proposes a pervasive gridapproach to define a user-friendly software infrastructure fordata acquisition from electrical networks and for data processingin order to simulate possible contingencies in a real electrical network.The grid infrastructure adopts a brokering service, basedon an economy-driven model, to satisfy the quality of serviceconstraints specified by the user (i.e., a time deadline to simulatethe contingencies). This paper also discusses the deployment of theinfrastructure on a network of heterogeneous clusters and PCs tocompute the contingency analysis of a realistic electrical network.The experimental results obtained demonstrate the effectivenessof the proposed solution and the potential role of grid computingin supporting intensive computations in power systems.