Determine Path Distances to Buses

 

To access the Determine Path Distances from Bus dialog go to the Tools ribbon tab, and choose Connections > Determine Path Distances to Bus from the Other Tools ribbon group. The Determine Path Distances from Bus or Group dialog provides a way to calculate how far electrically every bus in the system is from a particular starting point.

After clicking the Calculate button, all buses that are part of the start element will be labeled internally as being a path distance zero. Then a calculation will be done that determines for each bus in the system the shortest total path length in getting from each bus to the Start Element. Buses that cannot reach the Start Element will be flagged with a very large distance (by default 10,000). The results of the calculation will then be copied into the Bus Field specified under the Bus Field to Populate option. The results will be displayed in a case information display at the bottom of the dialog.

The options on the dialog are described below.

Start Element Type and Element

Choose an element type to be either a Bus, Substation, Area, Zone, Super Area or Injection Group. Then use the object chooser to choose the particular object to be the starting element. For more help on the object choose see the Find Dialog Basics.

Distance Measure

Choose the distance measure that will be used to determine distances between nodes. Each branch will be treated as having a length based on the choice below. Note: negative values are not allowed, therefore negative values will be treated as extremely small lengths instead.

X - Per unit series reactance.

|Z| - Magnitude of the series impedance (based on the per unit reactance and resistance).

Length - Length field for each branch.

Number of Nodes - Length of 1.0 is used for all branches.

Other - When choosing Other, click the Find.. button to choose any numeric field of a branch.

Lines to Process

Regardless of the Distance Measure above, you can choose which branches allowed to be traversed when finding the shortest path.

All - All branches are allowed to be traversed.

Only Closed - Only branches that are presently closed can be traversed.

Filter - Only branches that meet the advanced filter specified can be traversed. Click Define... to choose or create and advanced filter.

Selected - Only branches whose Selected? field is set to YES can be traversed.

Bus Field to Populate

Choose a field into which the resulting path distances will be copied. It is recommended that you use the custom floating point or integer fields for this purpose.