Release Notes for GridPACK v3.4
Version 3.4 contains no major revisions to the version requirements for building GridPACK. Libraries and tools that could successfully build version 3.3 should continue to work for version 3.4
A summary of updates to GridPACK is given below:
• A real-time path rating application based on power flow and dynamic simulation modules has been created. This application defines source and destination areas and evaluates the stability of the tie-lines between the source and destination against contingencies as the power generation in the source area and loads in the destination area are scaled up or down. More documentation on algorithm and details of running the code are available in the README file in the GridPACK src/application/rtpr directory or from the Github repository at https://github.com/GridOPTICS/GridPACK/blob/release/3.4/src/applications/rtpr/README.md.
• The Environment module was extended to support the addition of a “help” capability that can be used to add help documentation to individual applications at runtime. These can be accessed invoking the application with a traditional –h or –help option.
• A power system stabilizer model was added to the dynamic simulation module. This corresponds to the PSSSIM model in standard .dyr files.
• Additional improvements in the build system have been made. The build documentation has been updated to reflect more widespread use of pre-built modules containing many of the libraries used by GridPACK. These can be installed relatively easily using utilities like yum or apt-get instead of users having to download and build them by hand. The build system has also been modified to automatically detect some libraries that may be needed by the build that previously needed to be added by hand.
• The downloading and building of the global Global Arrays libraries has be incorporated as an option in the build, which eliminates the need for downloading and building the library externally. However, we have found that this does not work on some platforms so we are still including documentation on using an external GA library. The automatic download and build can be accessed by including the option ‘-D BUILD_GA:BOOL=ON’ in the cmake configuration invocation.
• The requirement that the PETSc libraries linked to GridPACK be built with the C++ interface was removed. This enables most pre-built PETSc modules to be used with GridPACK instead of having to build them by hand. We have found that many prebuilt modules are built with real instead of complex variables and that the real builds have introduced some failures in the GridPACK test suite on some platforms for higher versions of PETSc (greater than about 8.0). For this reason, we recommend that users link to older versions of PETSc if using a build based on real variables. We have tested GridPACK up to PETSc version 11 but have seen some failures in some tests in the GridPACK test suite at the higher version numbers.
• A network level data collection object has been added to the network. This enables additional annotations that apply to the network as a whole to be added to the network object. The main reason for doing this was to provide a mechanism for storing information from network configuration files (PSS/E raw files describing the network topology and parameters) that did not describe individual buses or branches.
• An input stream object has been developed and used to replace the standard ifstream object used in the PSS/E parsers. This will enable GridPACK to switch between different input sources (file systems, data bases, etc.) seamlessly.