usually provided during planned outages or forced real-time outages or contingencies. In addition, the variability of generation dispatch introduced by markets and load conditions in a deregulated environment and the amount of time required to obtain SOLs based on different system conditions, have warranted that conservative path SOLs be used. However, using conservative path SOLs can lead to usage of expensive generation and market congestion where markets exist. During forced outages or real-time contingencies, operators usually provide SOLs based on procedures. The procedures are usually based on offline studies that employ conservative
assumptions simply because of the time required to complete such studies. These may be updated based on real-time studies. However, determining path limits in real-time can be time consuming. The development of such an automated process helps in eliminating the time spent to manually test the set of credible contingencies, analyze results and determine the limiting contingencies, increase or decrease path flows and eventually identify the SOL based on a set of stopping criterion. In addition it is observed that setting up a process to modify Operations Planning cases with real-time data can help in identifying issues that are observed in real-time, but not in the offline studies simply because of the gap between the assumptions used in offline studies and real-time system conditions. Most professional power system analysis oftware
packages now have the ability to be invoked in batch modes.Object Oriented Programming languages like Python can be utilized to develop automated processes that can invoke these batch modes to combine the power flow solution engines available in professional packages with automation of iterative processes. This not only allows studies to be completed faster but saves the valuable time of engineers which can be spent more on understanding the system and making decisions. In addition, the engineer has full control of the iterative process which can be adjusted and modified accordingly. The automated process also avoids a prolonged use of procedure-based conservative limits during real-time contingencies and forced outages. The development of the automated process also aids in the development of determining real-time path SOLs based on real-time system conditions. Towards this goal, a module has been developed to extract real-time system conditions and provide real-time cases to the Path Study Tool.However processes can also be setup to provide real-time cases from EMS. The designed framework and its in-house implementation has resulted in significant time-savings and demonstrates the many advantages of automating manual and repetitive tasks performed by the user during a path study process that involves variable contingency definitions during each iteration due to Varying RAS actions. It also serves as a mechanism of continuous benchmarking to validate other dedicated online tools that maybe used in its place.