IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 19, NO.

2, MAY 2004

987

Slack Bus Selection to Minimize the System Power Imbalance in Load-Flow Studies
Antonio Gmez Expsito, Senior Member, IEEE, Jos Luis Martnez Ramos, Member, IEEE, and Jess Riquelme Santos

AbstractThis paper reconsiders the notion of slack bus in load-flow studies. Instead of determining a priori which bus plays the role of slack bus, it is selected on the fly during the load-flow iterative process in such a way that the system power imbalance is minimized. The problem of selecting the best slack bus, or buses, is first formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. Then, the results obtained are justified on the basis of the involved equality constraint being a quasilinear function, leading to an LP problem with trivial solution. It turns out that the optimal solution can be easily found from the results of a conventional load flow at a moderate cost. The proposed heuristic procedure is tested on the IEEE test systems. Index TermsIncremental transmission losses, linear programming, load flow, slack bus.

I. INTRODUCTION OLVING the load-flow problem requires that total generated power matches the total demand plus transmission losses. However, as such losses cannot be determined beforehand, total generation needed to supply a known demand cannot be exactly specified a priori. In consequence, it is necessary to have at least one bus (the slack bus) whose real power generation can be rescheduled to supply the difference between total system load plus losses and the sum of active powers specified at generation buses [1]. Following [9] and [10], this difference will be named system power imbalance. Furthermore, as phase angles of bus voltage phasors must be referred to some arbitrary reference, the voltage phasor of the slack bus is usually taken as reference and, hence, its phase angle becomes zero [1], [2]. Existing approaches for selecting the slack bus can be broadly classified as follows: A. Single Slack Bus Most textbooks fall within this category [3], [4]. The slack bus is considered a mathematical artifact created by the load-flow analyst, without any direct link with the physical system [5]. Active power is specified at generation buses, most likely including an estimation of ohmic losses. Hence, the difference between computed and specified active power at the slack bus represents the error in the prior estimate of system losses. Only in rare, typically small tutorial cases does the system imbalance represent total power losses, which may exceed the rating of certain generators for realistic systems. Usually, the largest generator is
Manuscript received July 31, 2003. This work was supported in part by the Spanish MCYT and in part by Junta de Andaluca under Grants DPI2001-2612 and ACC-1021-TIC-2002, respectively. The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Seville, Seville, Spain (e-mail: age@us.es; jlmr@esi.us.es; jsantos@us.es). Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2004.825871

arbitrarily proposed as slack in absence of better criteria, which is a good choice in case the total imbalance (i.e., the loss estimation error) is relatively large. Earlier load-flow algorithms were mainly concerned with convergence problems when selecting the slack bus. The first systematic study about this issue was presented in [6], where it is concluded that the optimal choice from this point of view is the bus with largest short-circuit current (i.e., the one diagonal element is smallest). Those concerns whose virtually vanished when the NewtonRaphson method was fully developed, as it proved to be much more tolerant of slack bus location than older methods [7]. Other suggested criteria for single slack bus selection are [6]: a) have a large number of lines connected to it; b) have a voltage leading all other voltages of the system. B. Distributed Slack Bus The distributed slack bus concept is implemented in some power flow programs, particularly those used in EMS applications. Under this approach, total system imbalance is frequently interpreted as a deviation of the load-frequency control mechanism. Therefore, it is assumed that the set of generators involved in the automatic generation control (AGC) contribute to balance the system in proportion to the so-called participation factors [8], [9]. Such coefficients can be determined based on [8]: a) machine inertias; b) governor droop characteristics; c) frequency control participation factors; d) economic dispatch [9], [10]. However, the units used for steady-state loss compensation need not be the same as those participating in AGC [9]. In [11], for instance, the vector of participation factors is made colinear with the specified generation vector (i.e., each factor is proportional to the respective generation scheduling). For localized power-flow solutions, a geographical criterion is suggested in [12], where it is shown that distributing the system imbalance among several nearby generators improves the performance with respect to the use of a single, probably remote slack. When a distributed slack bus is adopted, all active power mismatches are retained in the unknown vector while the state vector gets augmented with the system power imbalance in order to compensate for the missing phase reference [9], [10], [13]. Nonzero elements of the extra Jacobian column are simply the respective participation factors. In addition to the stand-alone load-flow problem, participation factors frequently arise in other applications where the load-flow problem constitutes the core, like economic dispatch [10], [11], deregulated markets [13], [14], sensitivity analysis [15], etc.

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It is worth noting that, by definition, participation factors are all positive, which means that all involved generators will increase (decrease) its scheduled power when the net power imbalance is positive (negative). Somewhat between both schemes, the multiple slack bus concept can be used to achieve net interchange adjustments between control areas in multiarea load-flow algorithms [16]. In this case, each control area may have one of its generating units designated as area slack, and net interchange is adjusted by changing the power output of all area slacks except the system slack bus, which must account for total system imbalance. This scheme can be also considered a particular case of distributed slack bus in which participation factors are determined on the fly to match the desired interchanges. It may be argued that a distributed slack bus better resembles the way power systems are operated, provided participation factors are properly chosen. However, this depends on the context in which the load flow is used (EMS, planning, deregulated markets, etc.). In this paper, no assumption is made a priori about the slack bus being unique or distributed. Any generation bus, or combination of buses, can play the slack bus role but, instead of resorting to a given set of participation factors, total power injected by each generator is decomposed into a major constant term, specified beforehand in the input file, and a slack power representing its unknown contribution to the net power imbalance. As the need for the slack bus is a direct consequence of the existence of the power imbalance, it makes sense to select as slack, the bus or set of buses that minimize such an imbalance, using the slack powers as control variables. This criterion can be shown to be equivalent to that of minimizing active power losses, even though the net system imbalance will differ, in general, from actual losses. Conditions leading to the choice of a single or distributed slack are also presented. The ideas presented in this paper might find application in some of the market-related issues still open, like that of loss allocation, but this is out of the scope of the paper which is focused on ordinary load flows. The proposed criterion to select the slack bus(es) is original and easy to implement in existing load flows. Unlike most slack bus selection criteria, which require the intervention of a skilled user, familiarized with the power system being solved, the proposed scheme provides an automatic procedure that may be useful in those cases where the user has no preliminary idea about the right candidate for slack bus. The paper is organized as follows: First, the problem of selecting the slack generator(s) in load-flow studies so as to minimize the power imbalance is presented, and the mathematical formulation as an optimization problem is derived. Then, some test results are presented and discussed. Finally, a heuristic approach to automatically find the optimal slack bus from the results of a conventional load flow is presented and tested on some IEEE systems. II. MOTIVATION In load-flow studies, it is customary to choose as slack bus the same bus whose phase angle is arbitrarily set to zero. However, while it is irrelevant for the load-flow solution which bus is taken as phase origin, the total system imbalance, and hence,

power losses, will be affected to a certain extent by the slack bus selection. Consider, as an example, the three-bus network shown in Fig. 1, where generation scheduling is determined in such a way that the system imbalance exactly matches ohmic losses. When bus 1 is the slack bus, total losses amount to 2.385 MW, while these losses are 2.412 if bus 3 is selected as slack bus. Therefore, it is preferable, from the point of view of reducing losses, to select bus 1 as slack bus in this case. Note that further reduction of losses could be achieved by increasing (decreasing) the net power injected at bus 1 (bus 3), as a consequence of branch 12 resistance being much smaller than the other, but this goes beyond the load-flow scope in which generation powers are externally determined and the only degree of freedom is the slack bus choice. In this paper, it will be assumed, like in the former example, that active power at all generation buses is specified. This is the case also when a distributed slack bus is adopted. Total specified generation may, or may not, as in the example, take into account an estimation of network losses, leading to positive or negative system imbalances. The important thing, as shown above, is that the resulting imbalance depends upon which particular bus is chosen as slack. Consequently, there is a margin to obtain improved load-flow solutions by carefully selecting the slack bus. Furthermore, there is no reason a priori to believe that choosing a single slack bus is better than distributing the total imbalance among several generators. In fact, based mainly on intuition, it is generally believed that distributing the system imbalance among several generators leads to lower losses [9]. The above observations provide the foundation for the work reported in this paper. III. PROBLEM FORMULATION Mathematically, the choice of a slack bus to minimize the system power imbalance, including the possibility for it to be distributed, can be exactly formulated as an optimization problem. denote the contribution of generator to match the Let system imbalance (in the sequel, will be referred to as the slack power of bus ). Then, the load-flow equations can be written as follows: (1) (2) (3) where, assuming bus 1 is the reference bus, the augmented state vector is given by (4) (5) (6) Note that the sum of slack powers must be equal to the system power imbalance, that is (7)

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EXPSITO et al.: SLACK BUS SELECTION TO MINIMIZE THE SYSTEM POWER IMBALANCE IN LOAD-FLOW STUDIES

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Fig. 1. Three-bus system and associated data (S

= 100 MVA).

In compact form, the set (1)(3) can be expressed as (8) equations in The above system comprises unknowns, which means that there are degrees of values of coefficients are freedom. Conventionally, set to zero, and that of the slack bus is determined after the load flow is solved, but there are other possibilities to obtain such coefficients keeping in mind a certain merit function. The objective function proposed in this paper is to minimize the net power imbalance (9) which, according to (7), amounts to minimizing the power losses. In case each slack power is assigned a certain cost , the slack bus(es) could be alternatively selected in such a way that the scalar (10)

three-bus system of Fig. 1, the unconstrained minimum of is achieved when and . This is not a desirable feature for a conventional load flow, which should not be allowed to redistribute power in this way when selecting the slack bus. Therefore, the slack should be further constrained, in addition to powers the upper limits given by (11). In the same way as participation factors are all positive when a distributed slack is to be positive adopted, it is reasonable to force each if the system imbalance is positive, in order that no generator reduces its scheduled power when there is a power s should be negative when there deficit. Similarly, all is a surplus of generated power. The problem is that there is no way to determine a priori which is the case, unless a load-flow solution exists. Considering that each term (or ) is null only when (or ), the requirement that all s are simultaneously positive or negative can be fulfilled by enforcing the following constraint: (12) Consequently, ignoring for simplicity the upper bounds (11), in an optimal way the problem of choosing the slack powers can be formulated as follows: min

(13) is minimized. Minimizing the cost associated with the system imbalance is just a matter of scaling the slack powers, and the procedure developed below for is directly applicable to . Two types of inequality constraints could be enforced when solving the equality-constrained optimization problem formulated above, as follows. 1) Equipment physical limits, such as maximum power flows, generator ratings, etc. However, except for reactive power limits, the remaining constraints are out of the scope of a conventional load flow and should be handled by ad hoc congestion management procedures. Furthermore, as the system imbalance is usually quite small, it is very unlikely that the slack bus choice drives any power flow beyond the respective branch rating. Anyway, simple constraints like (11) could be easily added as a safeguard against large deviations. , 2) If no constraints are imposed on the slack variables it may well happen that certain generators strategically located significantly increase their power share, while others get their scheduled power virtually cancelled by (i.e., ). For instance, in the a negative In order to remove the operator from the model, it is as follows: customary to split each (14) where and are both positive. This way, the equivalent problem that must be solved in practice is min

(15) It should be noted that the solution to this problem minimizes the extra power that generators must deliver when the power imbalance is positive, or maximizes the reduction of generated power when the imbalance is negative. IV. TEST RESULTS To begin with, the five-bus system of Fig. 2 will be tested. According to the data presented therein, total generation is equal

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TABLE I TEST RESULTS FOR THE 5-BUS SYSTEM (POWERS IN MEGAWATTS)

TABLE II TEST RESULTS FOR THE 57-BUS SYSTEM (POWERS IN MEGAWATTS)

Fig. 2.

Five-bus system and associated data.

in this case to total demand, which means that the system imbalance amounts to power losses. Table I collects the results of solving the optimization problem (15) in three cases. Case 0 refers to the base case; case 1 differs from case 0 in the way generators 4 and 5 share the total load, while in case 2, the load at bus 1 is significantly increased and the generation scheduling is also changed. The main conclusion is that, in all cases, the optimum is achieved with a single, rather than distributed, slack bus. The results also show that the optimal slack bus location is a function of both load level and generator scheduling, contrary to the systematic choice of the same slack bus conventionally performed in load-flow studies. The IEEE 57-bus system, comprising four generators, has been also tested. Table II presents the results obtained in four cases. Case 0 refers to the standard base case, in case 1, the total load is equally split among the generators, case 2 differs from the base case in the fact that the scheduled powers for generators 3 and 8 are exchanged, and the power of bus 12 is increased in case 3 so that the system imbalance is negative. The lowest row shows, for comparison, the losses that would take place by running the load flow with the standard slack bus (bus 1). For this system, this particular slack bus is actually the worst in most cases, which shows the importance of carefully choosing the best slack bus in accordance with network topology, load level, etc. This is clearly seen in case 3, where there is an excess of generated power and bus 1 is selected to maximize the power reduction. Like in the five-bus system, it turns out that the system imbalance (power losses except for case 3) is optimally provided by a single bus, which means that losses can be further reduced s are allowed to become positive only if the slack powers and negative simultaneously. V. EXPLANATION OF RESULTS The results presented above, and many more obtained in other experiments, lead to the conclusion that the system power imbalance is minimized when a single generator accounts for it,

Losses using bus 1 as slack bus. provided negative reschedulings are not allowed when there is a power deficit (and vice versa). This section is devoted to justify this conclusion and to discuss possible situations in which a distributed slack may arise. slack powers are As stated in Section III, when the degrees of freedom arise. added to the load-flow model, This means that, if it was possible for the conventional state would be variables to be eliminated from (1)(3), then all linked by a single nonlinear equation such as (16) Of course, because of the nonlinearity of the load-flow equations, there is no way to explicitly write (16). However, it is easy to obtain its linearized counterpart around a load-flow solution point ( , , ). Let denote the column vector when the reference bus is omitted. Then, linearization of (1)(3) , , ) yields around ( (17)

(18) where is the conventional load-flow Jacobian, is the Jacobian row corresponding to the reference bus (missing in ordinary load flows), and the column vector has been split for conveand , nience into its generator and demand components respectively. From (17) and (18), the following relationship is obtained: (19)

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or, in more compact form (20) refers to the columns of corresponding to . where can be obtained from the LU Note that the row vector factors of , without computing explicit inverses. Therefore, for small deviations around the load-flow solution, (16) can be linearized as (21) Note that the right-hand side of the above equation reduces to in conventional load-flow solutions, where the slack and reference buses are the same. Rearranging terms in (21), the , , ) can hyperplane that approximates (16) around ( be written in standard form as (22) It is important to realize that the coefficients depend on the solution point. The more constant these coefficients are, the more linear (16) is, and vice versa. Table III presents these coefficients for the three networks tested above (case 0), when the load-flow equations are linearized around every possible solution with single slack bus. The degree of parallelism between two different hyperplanes can be assessed by performing the scalar product of the orthogonal vectors associated with them, whose coordinates are deter. This leads to the angles shown mined by the coefficients in the bottom rows of Table III, the largest one being 0.22 . Therefore, it can be concluded that (16) is almost a linear funcare restricted to the region tion if the slack powers (or when the imbalance is negative). Fig. 3 represents the subspace (16) for the three-bus and five-bus networks. As the visual representation suggests, both subspaces fit pretty well the respective linear variety (the curvature has been exaggerated). For the five-bus system, for instance, a set of 35 load flows was run by choosing different slack powers within the feasible triangular region. A linear regression provides the best hyperplane coefficients shown in Table IV, along with the upper and lower hyperplanes defining the 95% confidence interval. These figures confirm that the subspace (16) is nearly a linear variety. Assuming the coefficients are positive and ignoring the nonlinearity of (16), the problem of choosing the slack bus that minimizes the system imbalance can then be formulated as follows: min

TABLE III HYPERPLANE COEFFICIENTS AT DIFFERENT SOLUTION POINTS

Original slack bus.

Fig. 3. Relationship among three-dimensional spaces.

the

coefficients

for

two-

and

TABLE IV HYPERPLANES OBTAINED FOR THE 5-BUS SYSTEM REGRESSION ON 35 POINTS

BY

LINEAR

(23) It is easy to show (see, for instance, [17]) that the above LP problem converges to the vertex where min (24)

When the coefficients s are negative (i.e., negative imbalbut ance), the inequality constraints to be enforced are (24) still applies (the slack bus corresponds in this case to that ). with largest For very large system imbalances (positive or negative), however, the validity of the linear model (23) could be questioned, and the LP theory can no longer be applied to conclude that the optimum lies at a vertex. Fig. 4 shows, in addition to the linear problem, two nonlinear functions with increasing curvature for the two-dimensional case (the thin parallel lines represent constant values of the objective function). As theoretically predicted, in the linear case, the solution point in the lies at the vertex with smallest coefficient ( example). This can also be the case for slightly nonlinear functions, like in Fig. 4(b), but not necessarily, like in Fig. 4(c), where lies at an intermediate point.

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Fig. 4. Two-dimensional optimization problem: (a) linear; (b) and (c) nonlinear equality constraint.

As proved in the Appendix, for every pair of coordinates and , the following two conditions must be simultaneously satisfied for the optimum to lie at an intermediate point: (25) where refers to the coefficient of in the tangent subspace (22) computed at the vertex given by and for . Since the function (16) is so linear, it is very unlikely that the two conditions (25) are satisfied, which explains the test results presented in Section IV. However, such a possibility exists, particularly when the weighted function (10) is adopted in order to minimize the cost rather than the system imbalance. Defining , it is straightforward to prove the scaled variables that (25) is equivalent to (26) For instance, applying (26) to the three-bus system yields

Based on the above findings, the following heuristic procedure is proposed that should lead, except for very pathological cases, to the same solution as if (15) was actually solved. 1) Obtain the load-flow solution by provisionally using the reference bus as slack bus. At this stage, there is no need to adopt a very tight convergence criterion. 2) Compute the coefficients of the tangent hyperplane (22) based on the LU factors of the last Jacobian. 3) Select as slack bus the one whose coefficient satisfies (24). 4) Using the new slack, perform extra iterations starting from the solution of step 1, until full convergence. This requires that the rows corresponding to the old and new slack buses be exchanged (phase angles should be shifted as well so that the new slack bus is also the reference bus). This procedure is based on the empirical observation that the bus whose hyperplane coefficient is the smallest seldom changes with the slack bus, because of the parallelism of the different hyperplanes. In case of doubt, step 2 can be performed again to check that the slack bus remains the same. Furthermore, let be the chosen slack bus and the bus whose coefficient is closest to that of . In case , the possibility of a distributed slack can be confirmed or discarded by obtaining a new load flow with as slack bus and then checking (25). This extra work is seldom justified because, even if the system imbalance is distributed between and , the power reduction achieved will be very small. The need for a distributed slack bus may arise, however, when upper limits are imposed upon slack powers. For instance, if , then and

which is indeed a very narrow interval. The intermediate point and is reached when . The Appendix also shows that the hyperplane coefficients are related with the incremental transmission loss coefficients through

is the optimal solution provided

VII. RESULTS PROVIDED BY THE HEURISTIC APPROACH The procedure presented in the former section has been applied to the IEEE 118-bus system (data taken from [18]). Table V presents the three buses , , and with smallest tangent hyperplane coefficients. The first row corresponds to the standard slack bus of the test case, the second refers to the , and the third is obtained with slack bus deemed as optimal . the best competitor of the chosen slack bus The following comments are in order: As happened with the 57-bus system, the original slack bus is not the best choice to reduce the system imbalance (in this case, it is third in the ranking). The ranking of candidate slack buses is not altered by the particular slack bus adopted to obtain the tangent hyperplane. This may not be true in all cases. The hyperplane coefficients are negative this time, which means that the generated power must be reduced. Choosing bus 89 as slack, instead of bus 69, leads to an extra 8.6% reduction, which is not negligible. Computing the coefficients when bus 87 is the slack bus is not actually needed. They are included in Table V just

which means that a given slack bus is optimal, from the point of view of reducing the system imbalance, when the resulting ITL coefficients are all positive. Otherwise, the bus with lowest ITL should be chosen as slack. VI. HEURISTIC SELECTION OF THE SLACK BUS From the above discussion, it can be concluded that there is no need to worry in practice about the possibility for the system imbalance to be distributed among several generating buses, unless it is very large and the two smallest hyperplane coefficients are very similar. Furthermore, it would be quite awkward to resort to an optimization package every time a load flow must be solved.

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TABLE V SMALLEST HYPERPLANE COEFFICIENTS AT DIFFERENT VERTICES (118-BUS SYSTEM)

system is solved twice, first with a single slack bus and then with a distributed one. The authors claim that, in the second scenario, power losses are less than in the case of a single slack bus, as expected. However, [9, Tables 1 and 6] actually show that the opposite is true, confirming the theory presented in this paper. IX. CONCLUSION

to check that the two conditions (25) are not satisfied and, consequently, to confirm that a single slack bus is the optimal choice. VIII. DISCUSSION AND REMARKS The following issues deserve further clarification. OPF versus load flow. Selecting one among several slack bus candidates, keeping in mind a certain merit function, constitutes an optimization problem and, as such, can be considered a particular case of the so-called OPF. One of the goals of the paper is to show that, for this purpose, there is no need to resort to such a complex tool, as the required information is a byproduct of the load-flow iterative process. The proposed procedure can be easily embedded within existing load flows, and the user will simply notice that the selected slack bus sometimes differ from that of the input file when this option is activated. On the other hand, the OPF problem formulated in this paper to theoretically found the proposed method is original in the way control variables, objective function, and constraints are combined. Conventionally, active powers are used as control variables when cost is minimized, while reactive powers are rescheduled to minimize losses [19]. In this paper, a preliminary loss minimization is achieved by carefully selecting the bus that takes care of the system imbalance. Constraining the slack power signs. From the OPF perspective, constraining the slack powers to be all positive (negative) when the power imbalance is positive (negative) might seem artificial. However, this is required to prevent the generation scheduling, determined beforehand, from being redistributed merely because of a small power imbalance. The reader should be aware that this constraint is also implicit when a distributed slack, based on conventional participation factors, is employed. This is clearly seen from the expression (27)

In this paper, it is assumed that when solving the load-flow problem, all generated powers are specified and that any bus, or combination of buses, can play the role of the slack bus. For this purpose, a slack power is introduced at each generation bus whose value is determined in such a way that the system power imbalance is minimized. When the slack powers are all constrained to be positive (or negative if there is a power surplus), the resulting optimization problem becomes, in practice, an LP problem with a single equality constraint, whose solution is trivially obtained at one of the vertices (single slack bus). Conditions for the unlikely possibility of a distributed slack bus to arise are also deduced from linearization around a load-flow solution. A simple modification to existing load-flow tools is proposed that should detect in nearly all cases the slack bus which minimizes the net power imbalance. It is also shown how the proposed method can be easily adapted to the case in which the cost of the system imbalance is to be minimized. Major contributions of this paper are: 1) an original and simple criterion to select the slack bus in load-flow studies without user intervention; (2) a theoretical development providing further insight into the implications of choosing a single or distributed slack bus from the point of view of ohmic losses; and (3) an algebraic and geometrical justification about the remote possibility of a distributed slack bus being preferable to a single slack when the power imbalance is a concern. APPENDIX A REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTED SLACK BUS Let and be a couple of candidate slack buses. When the remaining generators are discarded, the objective function (9) becomes (28) Also, in the resulting two-dimensional subspace, the tangent hyperplanes computed at the vertices and are (29) (30)

where is the system imbalance and the respective by definition, it folparticipation factor [10]. As is the same as that of the power lows that the sign of imbalance. Note that this constraint is crucial to reach one of the main conclusions of the paper, namely the fact that the system imbalance is minimized virtually in all cases when the slack power is provided by a single generator, which is somewhat contrary to intuition and general belief. For instance, in [9] a five-bus

For small perturbations, the objective function can be linearized around both vertices as follows: (31)

(32)

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The optimal solution will lie within the two vertices when the objective function decreases for perturbations in that direction, that is, when the following two conditions are satisfied: and or, equivalently (33)
Fig. 5. Geometrical interpretation of conditions for distributed slack bus.

Otherwise, the optimal solution will be the vertex when (and vice versa). Geometrically, (33) can be and in Fig. 5 being larger than interpreted as both angles 45 . APPENDIX B RELATIONSHIP OF TANGENT HYPERPLANE COEFFICIENTS WITH INCREMENTAL TRANSMISSION LOSSES In this section, it will be assumed that the system imbalance amounts to the power losses. For a given slack bus , the tangent hyperplane is defined by (34) Assuming this linear variety is a good approximation of the nonlinear function (16), losses can be expressed as follows: (35)

However, according to (36), this is only true if (38) which is not exactly the case, as shown by Tables III and V (the hyperplanes are not perfectly parallel). REFERENCES
[1] I. J. Nagrath and D. P. Khotari, Modern Power System Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. [2] R. N. Dhar, Computer Aided Power System Operations & Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982. [3] A. Bergen, Power Systems Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1986. [4] J. J. Grainger and W. D. Stevenson, Power System Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. [5] B. Stott, Review of load-flow calculation methods, Proc. IEEE, vol. 62, pp. 916929, July 1974. [6] L. L. Freris and M. Sasson, Investigation of the load-flow problem, Proc. Inst. Elect. Eng., vol. 115, no. 10, pp. 14591470, Oct. 1968. [7] W. F. Tinney and C. E. Hart, Power flow solution by Newtons method, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-86, pp. 14491460, Nov. 1967. [8] P. H. Haley and M. Ayres, Super decoupled load flow with distributed slack bus, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-104, pp. 104113, Jan. 1985. [9] A. Zobian and M. D. Ilic, Unbundling of transmission and ancillary services. Part I: Technical issues, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 12, pp. 539548, May 1997. [10] X. Guoyu, F. D. Galiana, and S. Low, Decoupled economic dispatch using the participation factors load flow, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. PAS-104, pp. 13771384, June 1985. [11] J. Meisel, System incremental cost calculations using the participation factor load-flow formulation, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 8, pp. 357363, Feb. 1993. [12] R. Bacher and W. F. Tinney, Faster local power flow solutions: The zero mismatch approach, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 4, pp. 13451354, Oct. 1989. [13] P. Yan, Modified distributed slack bus load flow algorithm for determining economic dispatch in deregulated power systems, in Proc. IEEE Power Eng. Soc. Winter Meeting, 2001, pp. 12261231. [14] G. M. Huang and H. Zhang, Transmission loss allocations and pricing via bilateral energy transactions, in Proc. IEEE Power Eng. Soc. Summer Meeting, 1999, pp. 720725. [15] W. R. Barcelo and W. W. Lemmon, Standardized sensitivity coefficients for power system networks, IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 3, pp. 15911599, Nov. 1988. [16] G. L. Kusic, Computer Aided Power System Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. [17] D. G. Luenberger, Linear and Nonlinear Programming. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1984. [18] [Online]. Available: http://www.ee.washington.edu/research/pstca/ [19] M. E. El-Hawary, Optimal Power Flow: Solution Techniques, Requirements and Challenges, in Proc. IEEE Tutorial Course, 1996, TP 111-0. [20] A. J. Wood and B. F. Wollenberg, Power Generation, Operation and Control. New York: Wiley, 1996.

has been eliminated by means of (34). where the variable Consequently, the incremental transmission loss coefficient of , can be obtained from bus ,

(36) This shows that, as expected, the ITL information is embedded in the hyperplane definition. The opposite is not true, as each cannot be obtained from the ITL coefficients individual is specified. From the load-flow solution ( , unless ), this coefficient can be computed as . Note that is the optimal slack bus if and only if for all . The following expression, relating the ITL coefficients for two different slack buses and can be found in the literature [20] (37)

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EXPSITO et al.: SLACK BUS SELECTION TO MINIMIZE THE SYSTEM POWER IMBALANCE IN LOAD-FLOW STUDIES

995

Antonio Gmez Expsito (SM95) was born in Spain in 1957. He received the electrical engineering and doctor engineering degrees from the University of Seville, Seville, Spain. Currently, he is a Professor and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Seville, where has been since 1982. His primary areas of interest are state estimation and optimization techniques.

Jess Riquelme Santos was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canarias, Spain, in 1967. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Seville, Seville, Spain. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Seville, where he has been since 1994. His primary areas of interest are active power optimization and control, power system analysis, and power quality.

Jos Luis Martnez Ramos (M99) was born in Dos Hermanas, Spain, in 1964. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Seville, Seville, Spain. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Seville, where he has been since 1990. His primary areas of interest are active and reactive power optimization and control, power system analysis, and power quality.

Authorized licensed use limited to: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY DURGAPUR. Downloaded on September 8, 2009 at 07:39 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.