Copyright © 2012 K. F. Zhang and X. Z. Dai. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Some fundamental structural characteristics of large-scale power systems are analyzed in the paper. Firstly, the large-scale power system is decomposed into various hierarchical levels: the main system, subsystems, sub-subsystems, down to its basic components. The proposed decomposition method is suitable for arbitrary system topology, and the relations among various decomposed hierarchical levels are explicitly expressed by introducing the interface concept. Then, the structural models of various hierarchical levels are constructed in a bottom-up manner. The constructed hierarchical model can reveal the self-similarity characteristic of large-scale power systems.