A decision support tool for transient stability preventive control

Abstract The paper presents a decision support tool for transient stability preventive control contributing to increased situation awareness of control room operators by providing additional information about the state of the power system in terms of transient stability. A time-domain approach is used to assess the transient stability for potentially critical faults. Potential critical fault locations are identified by a critical bus screening through analysis of pre-disturbance steady-state conditions. The identified buses are subject to a fast critical contingency screening determining the actual critical contingencies/buses. These two screenings aim at reducing the computational burden of the assessment, since only contingencies considered as critical are taken into account. The critical clearing times for the critical contingencies are determined. A preventive re-dispatch of generators to ensure a predefined minimum critical clearing time for faults at all buses is proposed, while costs are minimized. The results of the assessment are presented to the control room operator, who decides to accept the suggested dispatch or to repeat the assessment considering additional user-specific constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a standard nine-bus and the New England test system.