No Arabic abstract
Blackouts in power grids typically result from cascading failures. The key importance of the electric power grid to society encourages further research into sustaining power system reliability and developing new methods to manage the risks of cascading blackouts. Adequate software tools are required to better analyze, understand, and assess the consequences of the cascading failures. This paper presents MATCASC, an open source MATLAB based tool to analyse cascading failures in power grids. Cascading effects due to line overload outages are considered. The applicability of the MATCASC tool is demonstrated by assessing the robustness of IEEE test systems and real-world power grids with respect to cascading failures.
This paper explores whether graph embedding methods can be used as a tool for analysing the robustness of power-grids within the framework of network science. The paper focuses on the strain elevation tension spring embedding (SETSe) algorithm and compares it to node2vec and Deep Graph Infomax, and the measures mean edge capacity and line load. These five methods are tested on how well they can predict the collapse point of the giant component of a network under random attack. The analysis uses seven power-grid networks, ranging from 14 to 2000 nodes. In total, 3456 load profiles are created for each network by loading the edges of the network to have a range of tolerances and concentrating network capacity into fewer edges. One hundred random attack sequences are generated for each load profile, and the mean number of attacks required for the giant component to collapse for each profile is recorded. The relationship between the embedding values for each load profile and the mean collapse point is then compared across all five methods. It is found that only SETSe and line load perform well as proxies for robustness with $R^2 = 0.89$ for both measures. When tested on a time series normal operating conditions line load performs exceptionally well ($R=0.99$). However, the SETSe algorithm provides valuable qualitative insight into the state of the power-grid by leveraging its method local smoothing and global weighting of node features to provide an interpretable geographical embedding. This paper shows that graph representation algorithms can be used to analyse network properties such as robustness to cascading failure attacks, even when the network is embedded at node level.
Power grids exhibit patterns of reaction to outages similar to complex networks. Blackout sequences follow power laws, as complex systems operating near a critical point. Here, the tolerance of electric power grids to both accidental and malicious outages is analyzed in the framework of complex network theory. In particular, the quantity known as efficiency is modified by introducing a new concept of distance between nodes. As a result, a new parameter called net-ability is proposed to evaluate the performance of power grids. A comparison between efficiency and net-ability is provided by estimating the vulnerability of sample networks, in terms of both the metrics.
The frequent occurrences of cascading failures in power grids have been receiving continuous attention in recent years. An urgent task for us is to understand the cascading failure vulnerability of power grids against various kinds of attacks. We consider a cost restrained hybrid attack problem in power grids, in which both nodes and links are targeted with a limited total attack cost. We propose an attack centrality metric for a component (node or link) based on the consequence and cost of the removal of the component. Depending on the width of cascading failures considered, the attack centrality can be a local or global attack centrality. With the attack centrality, we further provide a greedy hybrid attack, and an optimal hybrid attack with the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) framework. Simulation results on IEEE bus test data show that the optimal hybrid attack is more efficient than the greedy hybrid attack. Furthermore, we find counterintuitively that the local centrality based algorithms are better than the global centrality based ones when the cost constraint is considered in the attack problem.
The understanding of cascading failures in complex systems has been hindered by the lack of realistic large-scale modeling and analysis that can account for variable system conditions. Here, using the North American power grid, we identify, quantify, and analyze the set of network components that are vulnerable to cascading failures under any out of multiple conditions. We show that the vulnerable set consists of a small but topologically central portion of the network and that large cascades are disproportionately more likely to be triggered by initial failures close to this set. These results elucidate aspects of the origins and causes of cascading failures relevant for grid design and operation, and demonstrate vulnerability analysis methods that are applicable to a wider class of cascade-prone networks.
We address the problem of maintaining high voltage power transmission networks in security at all time. This requires that power flowing through all lines remain below a certain nominal thermal limit above which lines might melt, break or cause other damages. Current practices include enforcing the deterministic N-1 reliability criterion, namely anticipating exceeding of thermal limit for any eventual single line disconnection (whatever its cause may be) by running a slow, but accurate, physical grid simulator. New conceptual frameworks are calling for a probabilistic risk based security criterion and are in need of new methods to assess the risk. To tackle this difficult assessment, we address in this paper the problem of rapidly ranking higher order contingencies including all pairs of line disconnections, to better prioritize simulations. We present a novel method based on neural networks, which ranks N-1 and N-2 contingencies in decreasing order of presumed severity. We demonstrate on a classical benchmark problem that the residual risk of contingencies decreases dramatically compared to considering solely all N-1 cases, at no additional computational cost. We evaluate that our method scales up to power grids of the size of the French high voltage power grid (over 1000 power lines).