See Also
Consolidation consists in moving the connection pointers of all the devices within a Superbus to a specially selected bus called the Primary Bus, and hiding not needed switching devices and buses. The Primary Bus is selected based on a default Primary Bus Priority Scheme.
Prior to consolidation, all the power system devices in a superbus, such as generators, loads, shunts and transmission line terminals are connected to their actual terminal buses in the physical system. After consolidation all the devices are connected to their corresponding Primary Bus. This makes the status and actually, the presence of switching devices in a superbus irrelevant, allowing the application to disregard them during the numerical solutions. A list of the branch device types that are allowed to be consolidated and exceptions to when these branch device types are not consolidated can be found in the Full-Topology Model topic. We say that the full-topology model is in a consolidated state and we call the representation of the system after consolidation, the Consolidated Representation.
A switching device that is directly in parallel (between exact same buses) with a non-switching device is internally flagged to prevent consolidation due to this switch. This is done to prevent series capacitors from being removed from the model when they are bypassed by their bypass circuit breaker. Note that the series cap can still be completely consolidated if the more complex network typically involving a disconnect causes their terminals to be at the same super bus, but prevent the obvious parallel switch is helpful.
After consolidation, the topology of the full-topology model is identical to that of an equivalent planning case and the models are electrically identical. However, in Simulator no case conversion takes place. Only the full-topology model exists in memory.
The following link contains an example illustrating the consolidation process: Illustration of Process.
The user is never allowed to interact with the model while it is in a consolidated state.
The user does not have access to the Consolidated Representation unless it is saved as a planning case as described in the section Saving the Planning Case.