Nowadays interconnected power systems work close to their limits because of increased economic benefits. If a severe disturbance occurs in any part of the interconnected power system, it can be propagated through it. If no intelligent supervisory action is taken, a power system may be driven into an emergency state which could either cause system collapse by natural islanding or total system blackout. One possible measure to be put in effect in an emergency state is controlled power system islanding. In this paper, our previously proposed multilevel approach for controlled islanding is improved by using slow coherency grouping of generators in the aggregation phase. The approach has been applied to the IEEE 118 bus power system. The results indicate that the best partitioning of the power system is obtained with minimum generation/load imbalance in the islands, and with the coherent groups of generators maintained in each island making the restoration easy. A comparison of the computational complexities involved in the spectral, multilevel kernel k-means and the improved multilevel approaches is made by applying these methods to the IEEE 9 bus, the IEEE 30 bus, the IEEE 39 bus, the IEEE 57 bus, the IEEE 118 bus, the IEEE 300 bus, the 2383 bus Polish and the 2746 bus Polish power systems to show the suitability of the proposed approach for controlled islanding of large-scale power systems. Ó 2011 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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