# AMPS: An Augmented Matrix Formulation for Principal Submatrix Updates with Application to Power Grids

## TL;DR

AMPS introduces an augmented matrix approach for efficiently updating solutions to linear systems in power grid contingency analysis, significantly outperforming existing solvers in speed and scalability.

## Contribution

The paper presents novel augmented matrix algorithms for principal submatrix updates, tailored for power grid security analysis, with improved speed and scalability over existing methods.

## Key findings

- Outperforms PARDISO by two orders of magnitude
- Outperforms CHOLMOD by up to a factor of 5
- Scales efficiently to large power grids, updating solutions in milliseconds

## Abstract

We present AMPS, an augmented matrix approach to update the solution to a linear system of equations when the matrix is modified by a few elements within a principal submatrix. This problem arises in the dynamic security analysis of a power grid, where operators need to perform N - k contingency analysis, i.e., determine the state of the system when exactly k links from N fail. Our algorithms augment the matrix to account for the changes in it, and then compute the solution to the augmented system without refactoring the modified matrix. We provide two algorithms, a direct method, and a hybrid direct-iterative method for solving the augmented system. We also exploit the sparsity of the matrices and vectors to accelerate the overall computation. We analyze the time complexity of both algorithms, and show that it is bounded by the number of nonzeros in a subset of the columns of the Cholesky factor that are selected by the nonzeros in the sparse right-hand-side vector. Our algorithms are compared on three power grids with PARDISO, a parallel direct solver, and CHOLMOD, a direct solver with the ability to modify the Cholesky factors of the matrix. We show that our augmented algorithms outperform PARDISO (by two orders of magnitude), and CHOLMOD (by a factor of up to 5). Further, our algorithms scale better than CHOLMOD as the number of elements updated increases. The solutions are computed with high accuracy. Our algorithms are capable of computing N - k contingency analysis on a 778 thousand bus grid, updating a solution with k = 20 elements in 16 milliseconds on an Intel Xeon processor.