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AbstractThis paper reconsiders the notion of slack bus in arbitrarily proposed as slack in absence of better criteria, which
load-flow studies. Instead of determining a priori which bus plays is a good choice in case the total imbalance (i.e., the loss esti-
the role of slack bus, it is selected on the fly during the load-flow mation error) is relatively large.
iterative process in such a way that the system power imbalance is
minimized. The problem of selecting the best slack bus, or buses,
Earlier load-flow algorithms were mainly concerned with
is first formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. Then, the convergence problems when selecting the slack bus. The first
results obtained are justified on the basis of the involved equality systematic study about this issue was presented in [6], where
constraint being a quasilinear function, leading to an LP problem it is concluded that the optimal choice from this point of
with trivial solution. It turns out that the optimal solution can view is the bus with largest short-circuit current (i.e., the one
be easily found from the results of a conventional load flow at a whose diagonal element is smallest). Those concerns
moderate cost. The proposed heuristic procedure is tested on the
IEEE test systems. virtually vanished when the NewtonRaphson method was
fully developed, as it proved to be much more tolerant of slack
Index TermsIncremental transmission losses, linear program-
bus location than older methods [7].
ming, load flow, slack bus.
Other suggested criteria for single slack bus selection are [6]:
a) have a large number of lines connected to it; b) have a voltage
I. INTRODUCTION leading all other voltages of the system.
It is worth noting that, by definition, participation factors are power losses, will be affected to a certain extent by the slack bus
all positive, which means that all involved generators will in- selection.
crease (decrease) its scheduled power when the net power im- Consider, as an example, the three-bus network shown in
balance is positive (negative). Fig. 1, where generation scheduling is determined in such a way
Somewhat between both schemes, the multiple slack bus con- that the system imbalance exactly matches ohmic losses. When
cept can be used to achieve net interchange adjustments be- bus 1 is the slack bus, total losses amount to 2.385 MW, while
tween control areas in multiarea load-flow algorithms [16]. In these losses are 2.412 if bus 3 is selected as slack bus. There-
this case, each control area may have one of its generating units fore, it is preferable, from the point of view of reducing losses,
designated as area slack, and net interchange is adjusted by to select bus 1 as slack bus in this case. Note that further reduc-
changing the power output of all area slacks except the system tion of losses could be achieved by increasing (decreasing) the
slack bus, which must account for total system imbalance. This net power injected at bus 1 (bus 3), as a consequence of branch
scheme can be also considered a particular case of distributed 12 resistance being much smaller than the other, but this goes
slack bus in which participation factors are determined on the beyond the load-flow scope in which generation powers are ex-
fly to match the desired interchanges. ternally determined and the only degree of freedom is the slack
It may be argued that a distributed slack bus better resembles bus choice.
the way power systems are operated, provided participation fac- In this paper, it will be assumed, like in the former example,
tors are properly chosen. However, this depends on the context that active power at all generation buses is specified. This is the
in which the load flow is used (EMS, planning, deregulated mar- case also when a distributed slack bus is adopted. Total specified
kets, etc.). generation may, or may not, as in the example, take into account
In this paper, no assumption is made a priori about the slack an estimation of network losses, leading to positive or negative
bus being unique or distributed. Any generation bus, or com- system imbalances. The important thing, as shown above, is that
bination of buses, can play the slack bus role but, instead of the resulting imbalance depends upon which particular bus is
resorting to a given set of participation factors, total power in- chosen as slack. Consequently, there is a margin to obtain im-
jected by each generator is decomposed into a major constant proved load-flow solutions by carefully selecting the slack bus.
term, specified beforehand in the input file, and a slack power Furthermore, there is no reason a priori to believe that choosing
representing its unknown contribution to the net power imbal- a single slack bus is better than distributing the total imbalance
ance. As the need for the slack bus is a direct consequence of among several generators. In fact, based mainly on intuition, it is
the existence of the power imbalance, it makes sense to select generally believed that distributing the system imbalance among
as slack, the bus or set of buses that minimize such an imbal- several generators leads to lower losses [9]. The above observa-
ance, using the slack powers as control variables. This criterion tions provide the foundation for the work reported in this paper.
can be shown to be equivalent to that of minimizing active power
losses, even though the net system imbalance will differ, in gen- III. PROBLEM FORMULATION
eral, from actual losses. Conditions leading to the choice of a
single or distributed slack are also presented. Mathematically, the choice of a slack bus to minimize the
The ideas presented in this paper might find application in system power imbalance, including the possibility for it to
some of the market-related issues still open, like that of loss al- be distributed, can be exactly formulated as an optimization
location, but this is out of the scope of the paper which is focused problem.
on ordinary load flows. The proposed criterion to select the slack Let denote the contribution of generator to match the
bus(es) is original and easy to implement in existing load flows. system imbalance (in the sequel, will be referred to as the
Unlike most slack bus selection criteria, which require the in- slack power of bus ). Then, the load-flow equations can be
tervention of a skilled user, familiarized with the power system written as follows:
being solved, the proposed scheme provides an automatic pro-
cedure that may be useful in those cases where the user has no (1)
preliminary idea about the right candidate for slack bus. (2)
The paper is organized as follows: First, the problem of (3)
selecting the slack generator(s) in load-flow studies so as to
minimize the power imbalance is presented, and the math- where, assuming bus 1 is the reference bus, the augmented state
ematical formulation as an optimization problem is derived. vector is given by
Then, some test results are presented and discussed. Finally,
a heuristic approach to automatically find the optimal slack (4)
bus from the results of a conventional load flow is presented
(5)
and tested on some IEEE systems.
(6)
II. MOTIVATION Note that the sum of slack powers must be equal to the system
In load-flow studies, it is customary to choose as slack bus power imbalance, that is
the same bus whose phase angle is arbitrarily set to zero. How-
ever, while it is irrelevant for the load-flow solution which bus (7)
is taken as phase origin, the total system imbalance, and hence,
EXPSITO et al.: SLACK BUS SELECTION TO MINIMIZE THE SYSTEM POWER IMBALANCE IN LOAD-FLOW STUDIES 989
(10)
(13)
is minimized. Minimizing the cost associated with the system
In order to remove the operator from the model, it is
imbalance is just a matter of scaling the slack powers, and the
customary to split each as follows:
procedure developed below for is directly applicable to .
Two types of inequality constraints could be enforced when (14)
solving the equality-constrained optimization problem formu-
lated above, as follows. where and are both positive. This way, the equivalent
1) Equipment physical limits, such as maximum power problem that must be solved in practice is
flows, generator ratings, etc. However, except for re-
active power limits, the remaining constraints are out min
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 (15)
(11) It should be noted that the solution to this problem minimizes
the extra power that generators must deliver when the power
could be easily added as a safeguard against large
imbalance is positive, or maximizes the reduction of generated
deviations.
power when the imbalance is negative.
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 IV. TEST RESULTS
others get their scheduled power virtually cancelled by To begin with, the five-bus system of Fig. 2 will be tested. Ac-
a negative (i.e., ). For instance, in the cording to the data presented therein, total generation is equal
990 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, MAY 2004
TABLE I
TEST RESULTS FOR THE 5-BUS SYSTEM (POWERS IN MEGAWATTS)
TABLE II
TEST RESULTS FOR THE 57-BUS SYSTEM (POWERS IN MEGAWATTS)
in this case to total demand, which means that the system im-
balance amounts to power losses.
Table I collects the results of solving the optimization Losses using bus 1 as slack bus.
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 provided negative reschedulings are not allowed when there is
the total load, while in case 2, the load at bus 1 is significantly a power deficit (and vice versa). This section is devoted to jus-
increased and the generation scheduling is also changed. The tify this conclusion and to discuss possible situations in which
main conclusion is that, in all cases, the optimum is achieved a distributed slack may arise.
with a single, rather than distributed, slack bus. The results also As stated in Section III, when the slack powers are
show that the optimal slack bus location is a function of both added to the load-flow model, degrees of freedom arise.
load level and generator scheduling, contrary to the systematic This means that, if it was possible for the conventional state
choice of the same slack bus conventionally performed in variables to be eliminated from (1)(3), then all would be
load-flow studies. linked by a single nonlinear equation such as
The IEEE 57-bus system, comprising four generators, has (16)
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 Of course, because of the nonlinearity of the load-flow equa-
load is equally split among the generators, case 2 differs from tions, there is no way to explicitly write (16). However, it is easy
the base case in the fact that the scheduled powers for generators to obtain its linearized counterpart around a load-flow solution
3 and 8 are exchanged, and the power of bus 12 is increased in point ( , , ). Let denote the column vector
case 3 so that the system imbalance is negative. The lowest row when the reference bus is omitted. Then, linearization of (1)(3)
shows, for comparison, the losses that would take place by run- around ( , , ) yields
ning 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 (17)
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 re- (18)
duction. Like in the five-bus system, it turns out that the system
imbalance (power losses except for case 3) is optimally provided where is the conventional load-flow Jacobian, is the Jaco-
by a single bus, which means that losses can be further reduced bian row corresponding to the reference bus (missing in ordinary
only if the slack powers s are allowed to become positive load flows), and the column vector has been split for conve-
and negative simultaneously. nience into its generator and demand components and ,
respectively. From (17) and (18), the following relationship is
V. EXPLANATION OF RESULTS obtained:
The results presented above, and many more obtained in other
experiments, lead to the conclusion that the system power im- (19)
balance is minimized when a single generator accounts for it,
EXPSITO et al.: SLACK BUS SELECTION TO MINIMIZE THE SYSTEM POWER IMBALANCE IN LOAD-FLOW STUDIES 991
(21)
(22)
TABLE V system is solved twice, first with a single slack bus and then with
SMALLEST HYPERPLANE COEFFICIENTS AT DIFFERENT VERTICES a distributed one. The authors claim that, in the second scenario,
(118-BUS SYSTEM)
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
In this paper, it is assumed that when solving the load-flow
to check that the two conditions (25) are not satisfied and, problem, all generated powers are specified and that any bus,
consequently, to confirm that a single slack bus is the op- or combination of buses, can play the role of the slack bus. For
timal choice. 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 con-
VIII. DISCUSSION AND REMARKS strained to be positive (or negative if there is a power surplus),
The following issues deserve further clarification. the resulting optimization problem becomes, in practice, an LP
OPF versus load flow. Selecting one among several slack problem with a single equality constraint, whose solution is triv-
bus candidates, keeping in mind a certain merit function, ially obtained at one of the vertices (single slack bus). Condi-
constitutes an optimization problem and, as such, can be tions for the unlikely possibility of a distributed slack bus to
considered a particular case of the so-called OPF. One of arise are also deduced from linearization around a load-flow so-
the goals of the paper is to show that, for this purpose, lution. A simple modification to existing load-flow tools is pro-
there is no need to resort to such a complex tool, as the re- posed that should detect in nearly all cases the slack bus which
quired information is a byproduct of the load-flow iterative minimizes the net power imbalance. It is also shown how the
process. The proposed procedure can be easily embedded proposed method can be easily adapted to the case in which the
within existing load flows, and the user will simply notice cost of the system imbalance is to be minimized.
that the selected slack bus sometimes differ from that of Major contributions of this paper are: 1) an original and
the input file when this option is activated. simple criterion to select the slack bus in load-flow studies
On the other hand, the OPF problem formulated in this without user intervention; (2) a theoretical development pro-
paper to theoretically found the proposed method is orig- viding further insight into the implications of choosing a single
inal in the way control variables, objective function, and or distributed slack bus from the point of view of ohmic losses;
constraints are combined. Conventionally, active powers and (3) an algebraic and geometrical justification about the
are used as control variables when cost is minimized, remote possibility of a distributed slack bus being preferable to
while reactive powers are rescheduled to minimize losses a single slack when the power imbalance is a concern.
[19]. In this paper, a preliminary loss minimization is
achieved by carefully selecting the bus that takes care of APPENDIX A
the system imbalance. REQUIREMENTS FOR DISTRIBUTED SLACK BUS
Constraining the slack power signs. From the OPF per- Let and be a couple of candidate slack buses. When the
spective, constraining the slack powers to be all positive remaining generators are discarded, the objective function (9)
(negative) when the power imbalance is positive (negative) becomes
might seem artificial. However, this is required to prevent
the generation scheduling, determined beforehand, from (28)
being redistributed merely because of a small power im-
balance. The reader should be aware that this constraint is Also, in the resulting two-dimensional subspace, the tangent
also implicit when a distributed slack, based on conven- hyperplanes computed at the vertices and are
tional participation factors, is employed. This is clearly
seen from the expression (29)
(27)
(30)
where is the system imbalance and the respective
participation factor [10]. As by definition, it fol- For small perturbations, the objective function can be linearized
lows that the sign of is the same as that of the power around both vertices as follows:
imbalance.
Note that this constraint is crucial to reach one of the main (31)
conclusions of the paper, namely the fact that the system imbal-
ance is minimized virtually in all cases when the slack power
is provided by a single generator, which is somewhat contrary (32)
to intuition and general belief. For instance, in [9] a five-bus
994 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 19, NO. 2, MAY 2004
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.
APPENDIX B which is not exactly the case, as shown by Tables III and V (the
RELATIONSHIP OF TANGENT HYPERPLANE COEFFICIENTS WITH hyperplanes are not perfectly parallel).
INCREMENTAL TRANSMISSION LOSSES
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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 Jess Riquelme Santos was born in Las Palmas de
Spain in 1957. He received the electrical engineering Gran Canarias, Spain, in 1967. He received the Ph.D.
and doctor engineering degrees from the University degree in electrical engineering from the University
of Seville, Seville, Spain. of Seville, Seville, Spain.
Currently, he is a Professor and Head of the Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the
Department of Electrical Engineering, University Department of Electrical Engineering at the Univer-
of Seville, where has been since 1982. His primary sity of Seville, where he has been since 1994. His
areas of interest are state estimation and optimization primary areas of interest are active power optimiza-
techniques. tion and control, power system analysis, and power
quality.