400
1, JANUARY 2011
A Method to Construct Equivalent Circuit
Model From Frequency Responses With
Guaranteed Passivity
Iraj Rahimi Pordanjani, Student Member, IEEE, C. Y. Chung, Senior Member, IEEE,
Hooman Erfanian Mazin, Student Member, IEEE, and Wilsun Xu, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—Converting the frequency response of a network into
an equivalent time-domain circuit is a common task in several
fields, such as power system simulations. A few good methods,
such as the vector fitting method, have been proposed to do the
conversion. Unfortunately, these methods sometimes produce
non-passive equivalent circuits which are hard to realize in time
domain or can lead to unstable simulations. In order to address
the concern, this paper proposes a new conversion method for
single-input single-output systems with guaranteed passivity for
the resulting circuit. The basic idea of the proposed method is to
represent the equivalent circuit as a matrix with varying dimen-
sion and unknown values. Genetic algorithm is then applied to
find the values and dimension by minimizing the errors between
the desired frequency response and that produced by the equiv-
alent circuit. Since the equivalent circuit consists of only passive
elements, the circuit passivity is always guaranteed. Details of the
problem formulation and the solution algorithms are presented
in this paper. Performance of the proposed method has been
confirmed by several case studies.
Index Terms—Equivalent electric circuit model, frequency-do-
main response, genetic algorithms (GAs), rational approximation.
I. INTRODUCTION
I T is a common practice in the fields of power systems,
microwave systems, and electronic systems to find fre-
quency-dependent models for devices and systems. Use of
frequency-dependent models especially via an equivalent
electrical circuit is straightforward in any simulation environ-
ment [1], [2] which enables fast simulations in both time and
frequency domain. Frequency-dependent modeling involves
producing a compact equivalent based on the tabulated fre-
quency response data obtained by field simulations or direct
measurements. A great deal of research has been conducted
in the past few years on frequency-dependent modeling and
several methods have been proposed. Among all these methods,
Manuscript received May 12, 2010; revised August 03, 2010; accepted
September 16, 2010. Date of current version December 27, 2010. This work
was supported by the Alberta Ingenuity Fund. Paper no. TPWRD-00345-2010.
I. Rahimi Pordanjani, H. Erfanian Mazin, and W. Xu are with the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB
T6G 2V4, Canada (e-mail: wxu@ualberta.ca).
C. Y. Chung is with the Computational Intelligence Applications Research
Laboratory (CIARLab), Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong, China (e-mail: eecy-
chun@polyu.edu.hk).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2010.2080323
0885-8977/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO.
vector fitting (VF) in its several formulations has become the
most popular one [3]–[11]. VF gets the frequency-domain
response and approximates it by a rational function with guar-
anteed stable poles. The identified rational function can then be
easily converted to an equivalent electric circuit [2]. However,
the main problem of VF is that the obtained model is often
non-passive i.e. the model may generate energy [12]. In this
case, the use of the model in a numerical simulation may lead
to unstable simulations [12].
Enforcing passivity has been a research interest for several
researchers in recent years and several methods have been
proposed for this purpose [12]–[20]. Reference [21] contains a
comparative study on lots of the proposed methods. The results
of this study have shown that although these methods can be
very useful, each method has some difficulties and limitations.
This indicates that the passivity of the frequency-dependent
models obtained by currently available methods is still a main
concern. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a method
for frequency-dependent modeling with guaranteed passivity.
For this purpose, a genetic algorithm-based method is proposed.
The proposed method gets the frequency-domain response and
directly finds an equivalent electric circuit. The equivalent
circuit consists of only passive elements and as a result, the
obtained model will be always passive. The proposed method
is for single-input single-output systems. However, the idea
may be used later to develop methods for frequency-dependent
modeling of multi-input multi-output systems.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the passivity
problem of VF is briefly stated using a case study. In Section III,
the basic idea of the proposed method is introduced. The idea is
to firstly select a general configuration for the expected electric
circuit and then represent the circuit by a matrix. This matrix
representation makes it possible to implement GA in order to
find the final solution. According to the proposed matrix repre-
sentation, some genetic operators are proposed. Also, the fitness
evaluation process which is needed during GA is discussed in
this section.
In Section IV, the procedure of the proposed method is pre-
sented and its steps are described in detail. In Section V, a sub-
procedure is proposed for generation of the initial population in
the GA-based method. Using this subprocedure, the speed of the
method can be increased significantly.
In Section VI, the proposed method is applied to several case
studies and its performance is investigated. Finally, Section VII
consists of the conclusion of this paper.
RAHIMI PORDANJANI et al.: A METHOD TO CONSTRUCT EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL
Fig. 1. Synthesization of vector fitting by an electric circuit.
TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THE OBTAINED CIRCUIT
II. PROBLEM STATEMENT
Vector fitting (VF) is the most commonly used method for
conversion of frequency-domain response into an equivalent
electric circuit model. For this purpose, VF gets the admittance
from the frequency response data and identifies a rational
function approximation for it. The identified rational function
is then represented by an equivalent electrical circuit which has
the configuration shown in Fig. 1 [2]. As an example, the zero
sequence admittance of a transformer used in [3] is considered
as the case study (the data are available in [24]). VF [3] with
the improvements in [8] and [10] is applied to this case study
and a 14th-order rational function is identified. The procedure
proposed in [2] is then used to represent the identified rational
function as an electric circuit. As a result, a circuit with the
parameters shown in Table I is obtained. Fig. 2 shows the com-
parison of the actual data and the admittance of the obtained
circuit. This figure reveals that the circuit is an accurate ap-
proximation of the actual data. However, applying the passivity
assessment [22] to this case shows that the obtained circuit is
not passive. Therefore, the passivity is needed to be enforced.
As explained in introduction, enforcing passivity to the ra-
tional function is still a main concern because every passivity
enforcement method has some difficulties and limitations. On
the other hand, even if the passivity enforcement can be done
successfully, the resulting electric circuit which has the config-
uration shown in Fig. 1 might still have some elements with
negative values. As an example, using the method proposed in
[13], the passivity can be successfully enforced in our case study
and the circuit shown in Table II can be obtained. Although this
new circuit is passive in overall, some of its elements bolded in
401
Fig. 2. Comparison of the actual data and admittance of the obtained circuit.
TABLE II
PARAMETERS OF THE OBTAINED CIRCUIT AFTER PASSIVITY ENFORCEMENT
Table II are still negative. In other words, the obtained circuit is
not a realistic one and is difficult to be directly used in most of
simulation environments.
III. BASIC IDEA AND DEFINITIONS
In order to overcome the explained problems, a new method is
proposed in this paper. The idea is to use GA and directly find
an equivalent electric circuit for the frequency response data.
The electric circuit consists of only passive elements including
resistance, inductance and capacitance. Therefore, the obtained
circuit will be always passive without any negative element.
At the first step, a configuration needs to be chosen for the
expected electrical circuit. As seen in Fig. 1, there are four kinds
of branches in the electrical circuit; , , , and
branches. Since the first three branches are special cases of the
fourth branch, the electrical circuit can be considered as a more
general circuit consisting of only branches as
shown in Fig. 3. Therefore, this circuit is considered as the main
configuration. In this configuration, the number of branches (i.e.
in Fig. 3), and the parameters of each branch (i.e. , ,
, and ) are unknowns. Therefore, the aim of the proposed
method is to find these unknowns so that the admittance of the
resulting circuit is an approximation of the given admittance.
In order to implement GA, some basic GA-related definitions
need to be considered. In the following text, individuals, genetic
operators, and fitness evaluation are defined.
402 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011

Fig. 4. Example for the mutation.

Fig. 3. General configuration of the expected electric circuit.

Applying mutation operation on this individual could result
in the following offspring individual:
A. Individual
Each individual should represent an electrical circuit with the
configuration shown in Fig. 3. For this purpose, the individual
is defined as a matrix as follows: As seen before, the element in the parent individual has
been mutated and a new individual has been created. Fig. 4
shows this example from the circuit point of view. In fact, muta-
Indvidual .. .. .. .. (1) tion keeps the configuration of the circuit unchanged and tries to
. . . . modify the circuit by changing the values of its elements. The
motivation for defining the mutation type 2 is as follows. As-
As seen in (1), each row of the matrix represents one of the sume that we have a circuit which can be improved significantly
circuit’s branches and the matrix has rows where is the if one of its elements is replaced by a short circuit or an open
total number of branches. From now on, is called as the size circuit. Mutation type 1 may be able to do this improvement,
of the individual. but it may need to be applied several times. On the other hand,
According to the definition of the individual, the admittance mutation type 2 can make this kind of improvements quickly.
of an individual can be obtained using the following equation: 2) Crossover: Two types of crossover are defined.
Type 1: In this type of crossover, two individuals are se-
lected, and two new individuals are created by recombining
(2) randomly chosen rows from the selected individuals. As an
example, consider two parent individuals and
where is the angular frequency, and , , , and as follows:
are in ohms, mH, , and Mho, respectively.

B. Genetic Operators
There are two basic GA operators, mutation and crossover.
The role of the mutation is to consider an individual and try to
modify it independently from other individuals. On the other
hand, the crossover takes two individuals and creates two new Applying crossover operation on these individuals could
individuals by combining the original ones. Considering these result in the following offspring individuals:
basic concepts and according to our individuals which are ma-
trices representing electric circuits, the following genetic oper-
ators are defined for our problem.
1) Mutation: Two types of mutation are defined.
Type 1: In this type of mutation, an individual is selected,
and a new individual is created by mutating the value of a
randomly chosen element of the selected individual.
As seen before, is composed of the first and the third
Type 2: In this type of mutation, an individual is selected,
rows of and the second row of . Also, is
and the value of a randomly chosen element of the indi-
composed of the first row of and the second row of
vidual is replaced by a randomly created very large or very
. Fig. 5 illustrates this example from the circuit point
small value.
of view. This figure shows how the crossover operation cre-
As an example of the mutation operation, consider the fol-
ates new circuits from the parent circuits. In fact, crossover
lowing parent individual:
combines the parent circuits and creates new circuits with
new configurations. As a result, the size of the created
circuits might differ from the parent circuits. Therefore,
RAHIMI PORDANJANI et al.: A METHOD TO CONSTRUCT EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL
Fig. 5. Example for the crossover type 1.
this type of crossover can have a significant impact on the
method because it does not let the method be confined to
a particular configuration and makes the method search
among circuits with different sizes.
It should be noted that if the simplicity of the final circuit is
important, a maximum size should be set in the crossover
operation. In this way, the crossover is not allowed to create
offspring individuals with a size larger than the given max-
imum size.
Type 2: In this type of crossover, two individuals are se-
lected. In each individual, one row is selected at random.
Some randomly chosen elements of these two selected
rows are then replaced with each other and two new indi-
viduals are created. As an example, consider the previous
parent individuals, and . Applying crossover
type 2 on these individuals could result in the following
offspring individuals:
As seen before, elements and in the second row of
and in the third row of have been selected and
replaced with each other. Fig. 6 illustrates this example
from the circuit point of view. This figure shows how the
crossover operation creates new circuits from the parent
circuits. In fact, this type of crossover is similar to the mu-
tation in the sense that it keeps the configuration of the cir-
cuits unchanged, and tries to modify them. However, while
the mutation tries to modify each circuit independently,
crossover type 2 uses the parameters of the other circuits
to modify a particular circuit.
403
Fig. 6. Example for the crossover type 2.
C. Fitness Evaluation
The aim of the method is to find an individual so that the
admittance of its associated circuit is a proper approximation of
the given frequency response data. The admittance associated
with each individual can be calculated for the frequency range
of interest by using (2). This calculated admittance should then
be compared with the given admittance data in order to evaluate
the goodness of the individual. Therefore, the main objective
is to minimize the error between the admittance data and that
of the obtained circuit over the frequency range. In other words,
the objective function can be defined as the minimization of rms
error shown in (3). The rms error is calculated for
each individual and the goodness of the individual is evaluated
using the calculated error. The smaller the error is, the better the
individual is
(3)
where is the number of the data points in the given frequency
response data, is the admittance magnitude of the th data
point, is the angular frequency associated with the th data
point and is the admittance magnitude associated with
the individual at the angular frequency of . is obtained
according to (2).
A common approach in vector fitting or in least squares ap-
proximation methods is to use a weighting since it is a pow-
erful way for controlling the accuracy of the results [2], [24]. In
this approach, instead of minimizing the rms error, minimizing
the weighted rms error is the objective. This approach can be
similarly used in the proposed GA-based method. For this pur-
pose, in order to evaluate the individuals, the weighted rms error
404
as shown in (4) should be used instead of the rms
error
(4)
where is the value of the weight function corresponding
to the th data point .
Any kind of weight function can be defined by the user ac-
cording to the frequency-domain data. In the following equa-
tion, some weight functions, which are slightly modified from
what have been proposed by Gustavsen [24], are suggested.
Strong inverse weight
Inverse weight
Weak inverse weight
The basic idea behind these weight functions is to provide
a higher weight for low admittance values in order to force the
fitting of these values. Basically, the method can find an accurate
solution without using any weighting. However, in some cases,
it may fail to capture the exact behavior of the admittance curve
at the frequencies where the admittance magnitude is too small.
This might happen especially when the admittance curve has
local maximums and minimums at such frequencies. In these
situations, strong inverse weight can make the method capture
the behavior of the low magnitude data points. One the other
hand, one difficulty with using the strong inverse weight is when
the data contain noise at the frequencies where the admittance
magnitude is low. In this case, the method might try to fit the
noise. This problem can be alleviated if a weaker weight such
as inverse weight or weak inverse weight is used. Since the role
of weighting in the proposed method is kind of similar to that in
vector fitting, [2] and [24] may be used to get more information
about weighting.
IV. PROCEDURE OF THE PROPOSED METHOD
Based on the definitions provided in the previous section, ge-
netic algorithm can be implemented in order to find an equiva-
lent electrical circuit for the given frequency response data. The
flowchart of the proposed GA-based method is shown in Fig. 7.
Some details about different steps of this flowchart are provided
in the following steps.
Step 1) Initially, a parent population consisting of in-
dividuals is created. This creation can be done ran-
domly. A maximum size can be also set for the in-
dividuals if the simplicity of the final circuit is im-
portant.
Step 2) Fitness evaluation is done for each individual in the
population. As explained before, rms error or any
kind of weighted rms error can be used for this eval-
uation. As a result of this evaluation, each individual
is assigned a fitness equal to the calculated error.
Thus, minimization of the fitness is assumed.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
Step 3) The defined genetic operators, crossover, and mu-
tation are applied to the parent population, and an
offspring population consisting of new indi-
viduals is created. Each time a genetic operator is
applied, the required parent individuals are selected
from the parent population using the binary tourna-
ment selection. To select an individual in the binary
tournament selection, two individuals are chosen at
random and the individual with the smaller fitness is
selected.
Step 4) The offspring population is combined with the
parent population and a combined population
is formed. The population is of size
. This step is done to ensure the elitism because
elitism is introduced by comparing the current pop-
ulation with the previous population [23].
Step 5) Fitness evaluation is performed for each individual
in the population , and each individual is assigned
a fitness equal to the calculated rms or weighted rms
error.
Step 6) individuals are selected from the population
and a new parent population of size is formed.
The selection is done as follows. All of the individ-
uals in the population are sorted based on their fit-
nesses in an ascending order. Also, if there are some
individuals with the same fitness, they are sorted
based on their size in an ascending order. After all
of the individuals are sorted, the first individuals
are selected.
Step 7) The process will be terminated after a fixed number
of generations. In step 7, the current generation
number is compared with the maximum number
of generations. If has reached the maximum
generation number, the process is terminated. Oth-
erwise, is increased by one and the process from
Step 3) to Step 7) is repeated.
V. GENERATION OF THE INITIAL PARENT POPULATION
As explained before, an initial population is created at the
first step of the GA-based method. Similar to any other GA, the
initial population can be created randomly. The developed GA
should have the ability to start with a randomly generated parent
population and find a good solution for the problem. However,
if the initial population is created based on the available knowl-
edge of the problem, the speed of the method might be increased
significantly. Therefore, in this section, a method is proposed
for the creation of the initial population in order to increase the
speed of the proposed GA-based method.
The given admittance data can be represented by a rational
function approximation as shown in (5) [3]
(5)
where is the total number of poles. The residues and poles
are either real quantities or come in complex conjugate pairs
while , and are real [3].
RAHIMI PORDANJANI et al.: A METHOD TO CONSTRUCT EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL
Fig. 7. Flowchart of the GA-based method.
Let us assume that the rational function has real poles and
pairs of complex conjugate poles. In this
case, (5) can be rewritten as
(6)
In (6), the th pair of complex conjugate poles has been ex-
tracted from the summation. Assume that the frequency is not
too low and the imaginary parts of complex poles are not too
close to each other. In this situation, the th pair of complex
poles more likely results in a peak in the frequency response
when the angular frequency is close to because
the denominator of will be much
smaller than the other denominators in (6). Therefore, the fol-
lowing guesses can be considered:
405
1) Each local maximum of the frequency response is more
likely, resulting from a pair of complex conjugate poles
whose imaginary part is close to the angular frequency at
which the local maximum occurs. In other words, if the
local maximum occurs at , the imaginary part of
the associated pole can be considered as (7). Also, the real
part of the pole is considered as (8)
(7)
(8)
2) Assume that the magnitude of the frequency response at
the local maximum is . As explained, is more
likely resulted from the term associated with the th pair
of complex conjugate poles (i.e.,
) in (6), when . Therefore, if the impact of
other terms is neglected, we will have
(9)
On the other hand, if the rational function approximation is
considered as the admittance of an electrical circuit, each pair of
complex conjugate poles can be represented as a
branch as shown in Fig. 1 [2]. The parameters of the branch
associated with the th pair of complex conjugate poles can be
calculated according to the following equation [2]:
(10)
If is considered to be zero, we will have
(11)
Combining (9) and (11) will result in
(12)
(13)
Therefore, by using (7), (8), (12), and (13), a pair of complex
conjugate poles and their associated residues can be estimated
as an initial guess for each local maximum. If this is done for all
local maximums, a set of poles and residues is obtained which
can be considered as an initial guess for the rational function.
Correspondingly, an electric circuit can be obtained by applying
(10) on the estimated poles and residues.
Therefore, the following procedure is suggested to obtain an
initial guess for the electrical circuit associated with the given
frequency response data.
406
Fig. 8. Comparison of the actual data and the admittance of the individual ob-
tained in Step 4 of the proposed procedure for the creation of initial population.
Step 1) Find the frequencies at which the fre-
quency response has local maximums. Also, store
the magnitude of the frequency response at these
local maximums .
Step 2) For each local maximum, set a pair of guessed poles
as according to (7) and (8), and set a pair of
guessed residues as according to (12) and
(13).
Step 3) For each pair of guessed poles and residues, find a
branch according to (10).
Step 4) Connect all guessed branches together
in parallel and form an individual for it.
Step 5) Create an initial population of size by applying
genetic operations on the individual obtained in Step
4).
As a result of this procedure, the initial population is created
so that it is not too far from the solution and, as a result, the
speed of the GA-based method can be increased significantly.
As an example, if this procedure is applied to the frequency re-
sponse of the transformer used in Section II, and the admittance
of the individual obtained in Step 4 is plotted, Fig. 8 is the result.
As seen in this figure, the admittance of the obtained individual
is not too far from the actual data, whereas the admittance of a
randomly created individual obviously might be very far from
the actual data. As a result, if the proposed GA-based method
starts with a parent population created by the proposed proce-
dure, instead of a randomly created population, it can reach an
accurate solution in a smaller number of generations.
VI. CASE STUDY RESULTS
In this section, the proposed GA-based method is applied to
different case studies. First, a simple transfer function is used as
the case study, and the performance of the method and the ef-
fects of different factors are investigated. Two real case studies
are also used to verify the method. The first case is the frequency
response of a transformer and the last case is the frequency re-
sponse of an actual power system.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
TABLE III
PARAMETERS OF THE OBTAINED CIRCUIT FOR CASE 1
Fig. 9. Comparison of the actual data and admittance of the obtained circuit
for case 1.
A. Case Study 1
A fourth-order transfer function is considered as the first case
study. If the proposed method is applied to the frequency re-
sponse of the transfer function, an equivalent electric circuit
with the parameters shown in Table III is obtained. Note that
the configuration of the obtained circuit is as shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 9 shows the comparison of the frequency response of the
transfer function and the admittance of the obtained circuit. This
figure reveals that the obtained circuit is an accurate approxi-
mation of the actual data (the relative rms error i.e.
the weighted error shown in (4) with the strong inverse weight
is ). Note that for this case study, the subprocedure
proposed in Section V has been used to generate the initial popu-
lation. Moreover, the following simulation conditions have been
considered.
• population size (i.e., in Fig. 7): 200;
• maximum generation number: 700;
• maximum size of individuals: 4;
• weighting type: strong inverse weight;
• computational time: 143.20 s (MATLAB 7.4.0, CPU: 2.40
GHz, and RAM: 4.00 GB).
The effects of two factors, including the proposed strategy for
the generation of the initial population, and the maximum size
of the individuals are discussed in the following text using this
case study.
Effect of the Proposed Strategy for Generation of the Initial
Population: As explained before, if this strategy is not used, the
proposed GA-based method still has the ability to find an accu-
rate solution. However, the strategy can increase the speed of the
RAHIMI PORDANJANI et al.: A METHOD TO CONSTRUCT EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL 407

Fig. 10. Relative rms error of different generations with and without using the
strategy of initial population selection. Fig. 11. Relative rms error of different generations when the maximum size is
2 and 4.

TABLE IV
PARAMETERS OF THE OBTAINED CIRCUIT FOR CASE 1 (MAX SIZE OF 2) TABLE V
PARAMETERS OF THE OBTAINED CIRCUIT FOR CASE 2

method. As an example, Fig. 10 illustrates the smallest

in each generation for our case study with and without using the
proposed strategy for generation of the initial population. Ac-
cording to Fig. 10, even when the initial population is created
randomly, the GA-based method has the ability to find an ac-
curate solution. However, it can be clearly seen that by using
the proposed strategy for creation of the initial population, the
speed of the method has been increased.
Effect of the Maximum Size of the Individuals: The maximum
size which is the maximum number of branches in each indi-
vidual is the most important factor influencing the simplicity
of the final solution. In other words, smaller maximum size will
make the obtained circuit simpler. However, this might make the
method reach an accurate solution in a higher number of gener-
ations. Therefore, there is a trade off between the speed of the
method and the simplicity of the final circuit. For example, if
the maximum size is set to 2 in our case study, the circuit shown
in Table IV which is obviously simpler than the one obtained
for maximum size of 4 (Table III) is the result. Also, Fig. 11
shows the smallest in each generation for both cases, Fig. 12. Comparison of the actual data and admittance of the obtained circuit
a maximum size of 2 and 4. As seen in this figure, when the for case 2.
maximum size is 2, the method reaches the same accuracy after
a much higher number of generations.
In Section II, the VF with and without passivity enforcement
B. Case Study 2
was also applied in this case study. Since the equivalent circuits
This case study is the admittance of the transformer used in obtained by VF (Tables I and II) have the same size as the circuit
Section II. If the proposed GA-based method is applied on this obtained by the proposed method (Table V), this case study can
case study, an equivalent circuit shown in Table V is the result. be used to compare different aspects of these two methods.
Fig. 12 illustrates the comparison of the actual data and the ad- Accuracy: The relative rms errors of the results obtained by
mittance of the obtained circuit. Also, the simulation conditions both of the methods are as follows:
for this case study have been considered as follows: • VF with passivity enforcement: 2.90E-2;
• population size: 200; • Proposed method: 3.52E-2.
• maximum generation number: 500; As seen before, the error of the proposed method is a little
• maximum individual size: 7; higher than that of VF. In other words, VF has a higher ac-
• weighting type: strong inverse weight; curacy. However, one point should be noted here. The higher
• computational time: 197.21 s. error of the proposed method more likely comes from the fact
408
Fig. 13. Real part of the admittance of the circuits obtained for case 2.
that the obtained circuit has no element with a negative value,
whereas the circuit resulted with VF have some negative ele-
ments. In fact, forcing all elements be positive results in losing
some accuracy. In other words, if the same accuracy is needed,
the maximum size of the circuit has to be increased so that this
loss of accuracy can be compensated. As an example, the pro-
posed method has been applied again on this case study and all
the simulation conditions have been kept the same except the
maximum size which has been increased to 9. In this case, the
method has resulted in another circuit in which the relative rms
error was 2.86E-2.
Computational Time: It is obvious that the proposed method
needs much more time than VF because the proposed method is
based on Genetic Algorithms which requires several generations
to reach an accurate solution. However, this cannot contradict
the performance of the method because the method is intended
for offline applications where the computational time is not a
big concern.
Passivity: A simple way to check the passivity of a circuit is
to examine the real part of its admittance . The
circuit is passive only if is positive at all frequencies [14].
Fig. 13 shows the real part of the admittances of the circuits
obtained by different methods. As seen in this figure, the cir-
cuit obtained by VF when no passivity enforcement is used, is
non-passive because its becomes negative at high frequen-
cies. It can also be seen that by using the passivity enforcement,
the obtained circuit becomes passive. However, the resulted cir-
cuit still has some negative elements, making the direct use of
the circuit in its original configuration difficult. Furthermore, as
discussed before, how to enforce the passivity is still a concern.
On the other hand, the equivalent circuit obtained by the pro-
posed method (Table V) is obviously a passive circuit (it can also
be seen in Fig. 13) without any negative elements. Therefore, it
can be directly imported into any simulation environment. This
is indeed the main advantage of the proposed method.
C. Case Study 3
The last case study is the frequency response of a 250-bus ac-
tual power system. Due to space limitations, the parameters of
the obtained circuit are not shown here, but the comparison of
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 26, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
Fig. 14. Comparison of the actual data and admittance of the obtained circuit
for case 3.
the actual data and admittance of the obtained circuit are illus-
trated in Fig. 14, indicating a good performance of the method
(the , and are , and , re-
spectively). Note that the following simulation conditions have
been considered for this case study.
• population size: 200;
• maximum generation number: 500;
• maximum individual size: 15;
• weighting type: strong inverse weight;
• computational time: 327.21 s.
As seen in this section, by applying the proposed method on
different case studies, the highly acceptable performance of the
proposed GA-based method has been verified. It is worthwhile
to mention that a more accurate result may be obtained for each
case study if a higher number of generations is used. Moreover,
similar to what was discussed for case 1, simpler circuits may
be obtained for the other cases if a smaller maximum size is set
for the individuals.
VII. CONCLUSION
A new GA-based method for conversion of the frequency-
domain response of single-input single-output systems into an
equivalent electric circuit model has been proposed in this paper.
The main idea has been to first select a general configuration for
the expected electric circuit and then represent the circuit by a
matrix. This matrix representation has made it possible to define
some genetic operators in order to implement GA for finding the
final solution. The procedure of the proposed GA-based method
has been described in this paper. Also, a subprocedure has been
proposed for generation of the initial population. Using this
subprocedure, the performance of the method can be improved
significantly.
The proposed method has been investigated using different
case studies. The results have verified the highly acceptable per-
formance of the method. The unique advantage of the proposed
method over the currently available methods is that it guarantees
the passivity due to the fact that its result is always an electrical
circuit consisting of only passive elements while the passivity is
still a main concern in other methods.
RAHIMI PORDANJANI et al.: A METHOD TO CONSTRUCT EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT MODEL
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Iraj Rahimi Pordanjani (S’09) received the B.Sc.(Hons.) and M.Sc. degrees in
electrical engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Poly-
technic), Tehran, Iran, in 2005 and 2008, respectively, and is currently pursuing
the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering at University of Alberta,
Edmonton, AB, Canada.
His research interests are power systems stability and power quality.
C. Y. Chung (M’01–SM’07) received the B.Eng. (Hons.) and Ph.D. degrees
in electrical engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong
Kong, China, in 1995 and 1999, respectively.
After earning the Ph.D. degree, he worked in the Electrical Engineering De-
partment at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, and Powertech
Labs, Inc., Surrey, BC, Canada. Currently, he is the Convenor of the Power Sys-
tems Research Group and an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical
Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests in-
clude power system stability/control, planning and operation, computational in-
telligence applications, and power markets.
Dr. Chung was the Chairman of the IEEE Hong Kong Joint Chapter of
the Power Engineering Society/Industry Applications Society/PELS/IES in
2007–2009 and the Honorary Secretary of the IEEE Hong Kong section in
2009. He was the Technical Chairman of the IET APSCOM2009 International
Conference, and Honorary Secretary of the IEEE DRPT2004 International
Conference and IEEE IAS 2005 Annual Meeting.
Hooman Erfanian Mazin (S’07) was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1981. He re-
ceived the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Amirkabir
University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB,
Canada.
His research interest is power quality.
Wilsun Xu (M’90–SM’95–F’05) received the Ph.D. degree from the University
of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1989.
He was an Engineer with BC Hydro, Burnaby, BC, Canada, from 1990 to
1996. Currently, he is a Professor and an NSERC/iCORE Industrial Research
Chair at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. His research inter-
ests are power quality and voltage stability.