1
Techniques for High Performance Analysis of Transient Stability
Lei Wang, Fellow IEEE
Abstract Transient stability analysis is one of the basic
analyses in the planning, design, and operation of power systems.
In recent years, one form of this analysis, referred to as on-line
Dynamic Security Assessment (DSA), has become increasingly
popular as a real-time control center application to monitor,
alert, and enhance system security by performing stability
analysis using real-time captured system conditions. However,
traditional transient stability analysis requires intensive
numerical computations and thus usually takes long time to
complete. This often makes it a challenge to complete on-line
DSA in required cycling time. Improving the speed of transient
stability analysis has been the focus of extensive research and
development for many years. This paper describes a number of
techniques and methods to improve the speed of transient
stability analysis. Most of these methods have been practically
used with good success to various applications, such as on-line
DSA.
Index Terms Transient stability analysis, on-line dynamic
security assessment, real-time control center applications.
I. INTRODUCTION
Secure and reliable operation is a fundamental requirement
for a power system. In the current era of smart grid
development around the world, visibility, controllability, and
optimization for system operation is the focus of next
generation control center applications [1] which target the
high degree of uncertainty with regard to the scenarios and
contingencies that need to be examined so as to ensure system
security. This leads to the requirements to evaluate system
security, calculate system operating limits and interconnection
reliability operating limits [2] based on near real-time
conditions. On-line dynamic security assessment (DSA) [3] is
an approach that offers promising solution to these challenges.
On-line DSA models the network topology and operating
conditions seen by operators in control centers, and it
calculates the system security and operational limits using this
data. Generally, on-line DSA results more accurately
characterize the existing system conditions than the off-line
planning case and thus they allow the operator to evaluate the
impact of certain operating decisions with changing operating
conditions. Consequently, DSA conducted in a near real-time
setting greatly enhances the operational decision making
capability of an operator and significantly reduces the risk of
cascading blackouts by evaluating limits based on real-time
system conditions and topology. As a result of these
advantages, on-line DSA has become increasingly popular as
The author is with Powertech Labs Inc., Surrey, BC, Canada
(lei.wang@powertechlabs.com).
978-1-4673-2729-9/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE
an important control center application [4].
An on-line DSA system usually includes several analysis
modules for assessment of different types of power system
security problems. One of such modules is TSA (Transient
Stability Analysis) for examining the transient performance of
a power system. The solver in TSA needs to deal with the
following functional requirements:
Contingency screening to identify a small set of
potentially critical contingencies from a comprehensive
list for further detailed analysis. This function is
primarily for speeding up the computations of TSA.
Detailed contingency analysis with time-domain
simulations for the set of critical contingencies. This
uses a numerical integration technique to solve the
detailed non-linear differential equations describing the
full system dynamics. This includes numerically
intensive computations and is also the core function of
TSA.
Power transfer limit determination to show actual system
operation constraints and security margins. This
involves repetitive time-domain simulations so
numerically intensive computations are required. Refer
to Section II for further discussions on this function.
Remedial action recommendations if the system will be
unstable for a contingency or the security margin is
insufficient for an operation condition. Such
recommendations are often obtained and/or verified with
time-domain simulations and therefore this function is
also subject to the same computation bottleneck as the
detailed contingency analysis.
As shown above, the core function in a TSA solver is the
time-domain simulations which can take long time to
complete for large system models. For this reason, the
computation speed of TSA has been the bottleneck for
applications of on-line TSA, particularly for large systems. It
is recognized that information technology (in both computer
hardware and application software) has had tremendous
progresses in the last decades and this has made it possible to
simulate larger system models, to perform longer simulations,
and to process more contingencies in TSA. For example, a
simulation speed improvement of 20% to 30% for TSA is
observed by using the latest compiler technology.
Nonetheless, to meet the ever increasing demand from on-line
TSA, special techniques are required and this has led to
significant research and development which have resulted in
some effective and practical methods.
This paper describes some of the techniques and methods
that have been developed and adopted for on-line TSA to
improve its speed performance. These are presented in two
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categories: ported for on-line TSA. Computation speed is a serious

Advanced analysis methods
Engineering-inspired methods
It is clear that to describe all methods ever developed for fast
TSA is an impossible task. This paper describes only those
that have been widely used or have shown reasonable
potential in practical applications. New technologies, such as
cloud computations, that could have significant impact on
TSA performance but are still in development stage, are not
considered in this paper.
II. NEED AND CHALLENGES
FOR FAST TRANSIENT STABILITY ANALYSIS
The pursuit for fast TSA started ever since this is
recognized as one of the critical problems to be studied for
power system planning and operation. The computation speed
for TSA is of more concern for on-line applications as one
computation cycle in on-line TSA usually needs to be
completed within specified time period, say within 15 to 30
minutes (some on-line applications, for example power market
settlement and special protection system lookup table update,
require even faster computation cycle). This calls for special
algorithms and techniques for on-line TSA for the improved
computation efficiency. On the other hand, the TSA problem
has also evolved as power systems continue to grow, and has
become more and more challenge to deal with. Some of the
issues that must be considered when developing fast TSA
methods include,
System model size
The sizes of power system models for TSA have been
steadily increasing as a result of system expansions. Figure 1
shows the sizes of the full eastern US/Canada interconnected
system planning models from 2007 to 2012. It is seen that in
five years, the model size is increased from 48,036 buses to
63,757 buses, or 32.7%.
Buses Generators
70000 62156
59612
60000
48036
53667 56124
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
7330 7454 7798 8059
0
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
Year
Figure 1: Sizes of the full eastern interconnection models
The model sizes for on-line TSA have also been
consistently on the rise. For example, performing on-line TSA
using real-time system models of 13,500 buses has been
reported [5], and 40,000-bus real-time models are being
concern when dealing with such large system models.
Effective and fast computation techniques must be used to
achieve reasonable performance.
Model complexity
Not only power system model sizes are increased, but also
the models are becoming more complex, thus requiring more
computational power to process. A typical example is the
gradual adoption of dynamic load models in TSA which
significantly increases the number of algebraic and differential
equations to be solved. Increased applications of controls
based on power electronics (such as those found in HVDC,
FACTS, wind turbines, etc.) also complicate the system
models. Another dimension of model complexity is due to the
special need in on-line TSA to consider models usually not
included in off-line studies, for example, relay and protection
models. Inclusion of these types of models not only makes
TSA slower, but also presents challenges to some of the fast
TSA analysis techniques.
Overall transient performance
Traditionally, transient stability has been defined as
maintaining synchronism among all generators. This is no
longer the only objective for TSA now. Due to various
reasons (for example, integration of renewable generation, use
of advanced controls, inclusion of detailed models, etc.),
assessment of other forms of transient performance in a power
system becomes necessary for TSA:
Transient voltage performance
Low frequency oscillations
Transient frequency performance
Analysis of such problems has special requirements for
TSA. One of these, for example, is the extended simulation
length which is now commonly set to 15-20 seconds. This
demands more efficient computation algorithms.
Compliancy with security criteria
To avoid widespread blackouts such as that occurred in
Northeast US/Canada on August 14, 2003, regulators are
enforcing more strict security criteria for both system planning
63757 and operation, for example, the latest NERC TPL standards
[6]. Compliancy to these standards requires extensive
computation simulations for a large set of contingencies and
fast TSA will certainly help in speeding up the process.
8282 8328 Transfer limit determination
2012 As mentioned earlier, TSA does not stop at performing
contingency analysis for the real-time system condition.
Often, the final results of TSA are presented as transfer limits
(or stability limits) at key interfaces of the system [7]. This
requires repetitive simulations for all critical contingencies at
different system conditions with different power transfer
levels. This task is very computationally intensive, and for
transfer limit analysis in on-line TSA, special fast computation
algorithm must be used in order to meet the required

performance.
III. ADVANCED ANALYSIS METHODS
During the past decades, a number of advanced analysis
methods have been developed for TSA (some were especially
made for on-line TSA) with mixed success in applications.
Here a summary of such methods is given.
Variable step-size integration methods
Variable step size integration methods are well understood
and they have been implemented in computer code for TSA
[8, 9]. This type of methods is best suited for long-term
simulations in which integration step size can be made large
after the initial fast transients are passed. They have also been
successfully used in on-line TSA for which computation speed
up to 10 times faster than the fixed step simulations has been
reported [9].
Direct methods
Direct methods refer to a class of methods that assess the
transient stability of a power system, and also give a measure
of degree of stability (stability margin), based on partial
responses of the system obtained from time-domain
simulations. Two main types of such methods have been
developed:
The transient energy function (TEF) methods such as the
BCU method [10]. Such methods are very fast but may
not be able to definitely identify stable and unstable
cases. Its main application has been in contingency
screening for which a large amount of contingencies can
be filtered to result in a small set for further detailed
analysis.
EEAC (or SIME) [11]. This method can give very
accurate conclusion on system stability from the time-
domain simulation trajectory. However, since full
simulations are used, it does not have computation speed
advantage.
It should be pointed out that direct methods not only can
perform fast stability analysis, they also give valuable
information on stability margin and sensitivities, which are
very useful in on-line TSA in which identification of system
stability for contingencies processed must be done
automatically. Such information is also useful in deriving
remedial actions for unstable system conditions to prevent the
system from losing stability.
Parallel computation
Parallel computation refers to performing a single
simulation in multiple CPU, CPU cores, or special processors
so as to speed up the computation. Parallelism may be
achieved for part of the computation [12] or for the entire
simulation [13, 14]. Parallel computation is very attractive in
speeding up TSA as technically it can improve significantly
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computation speed of simulations while still producing
accurate results. Many parallel computation schemes have
been proposed for TSA, but unfortunately few have actually
been used. The main difficulty lies in the fact that an effective
parallel code requires implementation of special algorithms
and such algorithms in most cases do not run efficiently in the
non-parallel mode which is the base for any commercial
software. It is obviously not practical for software developers
to maintain two sets of code.
Distributed computation
Distributed computation can be considered as a crude form
of parallel computation. Instead of achieving parallelism for a
single simulation, distributed computation parallelizes
simulations for multiple contingencies. Since TSA usually
includes assessment of many contingencies, this technique can
effectively accomplish significant speed improvement.
Distributed computation can be illustrated using the scheme
in Figure 2. In this scheme, a Client computer is networked
with many Server computers. A client management tool runs
in Client, which coordinates the tasks of distributing
contingencies to Servers and collecting results back from
Servers. In each Server, a simulation engine runs which is
controlled by the Client. The application of Client and Server
can be very flexible; they can run in different physical servers
or they can all reside in a single multiple-core server to take
full power of such a server. Thus, for a 24-core server, 1 client
and 23 servers can run simultaneously to allow simulations of
23 contingencies in parallel.
Client
......
Server 1 Server 2 Server n
Figure 2: Distributed computation scheme
The advantage of the distributed computation technique is
that very little code changes are necessary for the simulation
engine. Only additional tools need to be developed to manage
the distribution of contingencies and data communication
between the Client and Server. This makes it possible to use
the same commercial code in both distributed and non-
distributed mode with minimum amount of work.
The efficiency of distributed computation can be very high.
Figure 3 shows its performance for a practical case. The
power system model has 6,620 buses and 1,978 generators.
400 contingencies are processed, each of which includes a 10-
second simulation. The distributed computation is tested with
up to 10 Servers. In the figure, the time it takes to run all
contingencies in the distributed mode on the specified number

of Servers is shown as the percentage of the time taken to run
all contingencies using the non-distributed version of the code
on the same computer. Thus, it is understandable that with
only one Server, the performance (at 122.5%) of the
distributed mode is slower than the non-distributed mode due
to the additional data communication requirements. However,
with 10 Servers, the performance reaches an impressive
10.7%, implying that the overall computation speed is reduced
almost linearly with the number of Servers used.
130.0%
120.0%
110.0%
100.0%
90.0%
Speed (%)
80.0%
70.0%
60.0%
50.0%
40.0%
30.0%
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
No. of servers
Figure 3: Performance of distributed computations
Distributed computation technique has been successfully
used in practical on-line TSA systems, for example the system
reported in [5].
IV. ENGINEERING-INSPIRED METHODS
In addition to advanced computation algorithms, another
class of methods to improve TSA speed is originated from
engineering practices. The following describes some of them.
Early termination method
This is an intuitive approach in which conventional
simulation is performed up to a time point and a check is then
made periodically afterwards at a specified interval, based on
a combination of stability indices obtained from the
simulation. Very stable or unstable contingencies are
terminated as soon as the contingency status can be reliably
determined. For contingencies whose stability status cannot be
reliably determined prior to the completion of the simulations,
full simulations will be performed. Using this method, PJM
reported [5] that simulations of 60% to 90% of contingencies
in its on-line TSA system can be terminated before reaching
the end of the simulations, thus achieving significant saving in
terms of computation time.
Dynamic equivalencing
An obvious method to reduce TSA computation time for a
large system model is to use a reduced order equivalent
model. The key to this method is to create a high-fidelity
reduced order model to replace the full model. There is rich
literature on this subject [15] and commercial tools are
available to accomplish such a task.
As an example to illustrate the application of this method, a
4
dynamic reduction recently performed for BC Hydro is shown
here. A full WECC planning model with 18,022 buses and
1,922 generators was used as the base model. The objective of
the reduction is to create a reduced order model that has about
7,000 buses which would include the full BC Hydro system as
the study area. A coherency-based reduction was performed
using the EPRI DYNRED program and the resulting model
has 7,210 buses (40.0% of the base model) and 1,040
generators (54.1% of the base model). The time that it takes to
perform a simulation with the reduced model is 52.2% of the
time required for the full model. Figure 4 shows the accuracy
of the reduced model for a critical contingency, by comparing
two models which are dispatched in the same way to increase
the BC Hydro export to US from 233 MW to 2,957 MW
(close to the rated maximum export capability). It is seen that
the reduced model has acceptable performance at such an
extreme system condition.
9 10 Use of the dynamically reduced models for on-line TSA
may be required for other reasons. Since on-line TSA is
performed for real-time system conditions, the system
conditions external to the study area may not be available
from SCADA. In such a case, the external system will need to
be represented by an equivalent. Time-saving for TSA will be
the by-product with this approach.
Figure 4: Comparison of full and reduced models
Model tuning
Some of the large interconnected power system models
include dynamic model parameters that demand small
integration step size in order to maintain numerical stability
when using the designated simulation tool. For example, the
current US/Canada eastern interconnection models require an
integration step size of cycles (or smaller). The simulation
can obviously be made faster if a larger step size can be used,
while the result accuracy and numerical stability are
maintained. This can be achieved by tuning the critical
parameters to eliminate the source of the numerical stability
problem.
An example is presented here to show how effective such a
method could be. A full US/Canada eastern interconnection
model is considered, which has 45,000 buses and 210,000
parameters in its dynamic models. By changing the values of

only 140 parameters ranging from synchronous machine
reactances and time constants to exciter/AVR time constants,
the integration step size can be safely increased from cycles
to cycles resulting in a simulation time reduction of 38%.
Figure 5 shows the comparison of a typical simulation
performed with two step sizes ( and cycles). Only one
curve can be seen in the figure since the results are practically
the same for both cases.
Figure 5: Comparison of simulations at different step sizes
Lookup table approach
An approach for determining stability limits in on-line TSA
uses the so-called lookup tables, instead of performing
simulations using the real-time system conditions [16]. In this
approach, stability limits are computed using off-line
simulations for possible system operating conditions. These
results are entered in a database (referred to as the lookup
tables). In on-line mode, the system conditions available in the
lookup tables are compared with the real-time system
condition and the closest match is identified. The limits for
this condition in the lookup tables are then used as the limits
for the on-line system condition. This approach surely is one
of the fastest to determine stability limits in on-line mode as
no simulations are performed for the real-time conditions. In
practical applications, however, it may be subject to two
shortcomings:
There are possibilities that a real-time system condition
cannot be matched with the conditions available in the
lookup tables. In such a situation, stability limits will not
be available which would restrict the real-time system
operation.
Stability limits computed from off-line models are often
more conservative than those computed directly from
the real-time model. This would result in lower transfer
capabilities.
V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper discusses methods and techniques for improving
computation speed of transient stability analysis with
application to the on-line TSA. These methods are
summarized with their application potential to on-line TSA.
Application examples are presented for some of the methods
to show the benefits. These discussions are intended to serve
5
as references when selecting an appropriate method in an on-
line TSA project.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author sincerely thanks his colleagues Mr. Fred Howell,
Dr. Xi Lin, and Dr. Carl Wang for providing valuable
information used in this paper.
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[14] Zhenyu Huang, Ross Guttromson, Jarek Nieplocha, and Rob

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VIII. BIOGRAPHIES

Lei Wang is the Manager of Software Technologies at Powertech

Labs Inc., Surrey, BC, Canada. He is a Fellow of IEEE.