Black-Start Decision Making Based on Affinity Propagation and TOPSIS

Abstract

Finding the optimal black-start alternative plays an important role in speeding up the restoration process of a power system after a complete blackout. In this article, a clustering method, affinity propagation, is adopted to deal with the black-start decision making problem. A novel black-start decision making method based on affinity propagation and TOPSIS is proposed. The standard deviation method is used to calculate the weights of the indexes, and a weighted normalized decision matrix is constructed. Then affinity propagation is used to cluster the black-start schemes of the weighted normalized decision matrix, and the optimal cluster is determined. Finally, for each black-start scheme in the optimal cluster, the relative closeness value is computed according to the TOPSIS method, and the best black-start scheme is selected. Compared with the existing black-start decision making methods, the proposed method can not only rank the black-start schemes but also determine which grade each black-start scheme should belong to. Based on the data of an actual power system, experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method is effective.