Automatic Generation of Power System Simulation Data Cases From Utility Databases: Introducing a new technology

What is the most time-consuming part of simulations? In the past, the answer was the simulation itself. So, many experts worked very hard to develop faster simulation algorithms with less consumption of memory. It was also true that many experts worked hard on applying a new computing facility—for instance, a parallel computer—to a specific type of simulation. Those efforts were begun to make the simulation time shorter as much as possible with less memory consumption. However, now, computers are extremely fast with a sufficient amount of memory. For instance, the smartphone in my hand has a gigahertz-clock CPU with eight cores and gigabytes of memory. This is much better than even the mainframe computer shared by many students and even professors when I was a university student about 30 years ago. Laptop and desktop computers and cloud servers today have even better CPUs, memories, and storage. Of course, a faster simulation speed with less consumption of memory is still important since people want to simulate more complex and thus realistic simulation cases with a shorter or similar simulation time. However, this is not the most important aspect anymore, at least for power system simulations.