Numerical polynomial homotopy continuation method to locate all the power flow solutions

Abstract

The manuscript addresses the problem of finding all solutions of power flow equations or other similar non-linear system of algebraic equations. This problem arises naturally in a number of power systems contexts, most importantly the direct methods for transient stability analysis and voltage stability assessment. Here, the authors introduce a novel form of homotopy continuation method called the numerical polynomial homotopy continuation method that is mathematically guaranteed to find all the solutions without ever encountering a bifurcation. Since finding real solutions is much more challenging, first the authors embed the real form of power flow equation in complex space, and then track the generally unphysical solutions with complex values of real and imaginary parts of the voltages. The solutions converge to physical real form in the end of the homotopy. The so-called gamma-trick mathematically rigorously ensures that all the paths are well-behaved along the paths, so unlike other continuation approaches, no special handling of bifurcations is necessary. The method is embarrassingly parallelisable. The authors demonstrate the technique performance by solving several test cases up to the 14 buses. Finally, they discuss possible strategies for scaling the method to large size systems, and propose several applications for security assessments.