31. A Computing Tool for Composite Power System Reliability Evaluation Based on Monte Carlo Simulation and Parallel Processing

This paper describes some of our efforts to reduce the execution time of a computing tool, namely VietReli, for composite power system reliability evaluation based on sequential Monte Carlo simulation, especially when alternating current (AC) load flow and optimal power flow techniques are used. The approach is an adaptation of the sequential computing algorithm to parallel and distributed environment based on a cluster of multithread and multicore personal computers (PCs) as hardware and Message Passing Application Programming Interface (MPAPI) as software framework. Test results obtained on several actual power systems showed the high performance of the new computing tool in terms of speedup and simulation time. It is also shown that each thread of PC should be responsible for one simulation year at a time and that the number of threads involved on each PC must be defined beforehand for optimized utilization of computing resources.