The transmission grid is often comprised of several control areas that are connected by multiple tie lines in a mesh structure for reliability. It is also well-known that line failures can propagate non-locally and redundancy can exacerbate cascading. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach to grid reliability that (i) judiciously switches off a small number of tie lines so that the control areas are connected in a tree structure; and (ii) leverages a unified frequency control paradigm to provide congestion management in real time. Even though the proposed topology reduces redundancy, the integration of tree structure at regional level and real-time congestion management can provide stronger guarantees on failure localization and mitigation. We illustrate our approach on the IEEE 39-bus network and evaluate its performance on the IEEE 118-bus, 179-bus, 200-bus and 240-bus networks with various network congestion conditions. Simulations show that, compared with the traditional approach, our approach not only prevents load shedding in more failure scenarios, but also incurs smaller amounts of load loss in scenarios where load shedding is inevitable. Moreover, generators under our approach adjust their operations more actively and efficiently in a local manner.
Hidden failures present a noticeable impact to the reliability of the United States electrical grid. These hazards are responsible for protective device misoperations and can cause multiple-element contingencies across nearby components, greatly increasing the likelihood of cascading events. This paper provides an in-depth overview of the causes and risks of hidden failures and discusses methods for identifying critical locations where hidden failures could pose a risk of cascading failure, with the ultimate goal being to identify efficient mitigation methods that can prevent their occurrence …
Various methods are proposed in the literature to mitigate the failures in an infrastructure network. Failure mitigation can be carried out in an active or passive manner. In active manner, live backups provide the required reliability. Due to the high cost of active backups, failures can be mitigated in a reactive manner where mitigation starts when a function fails. In this paper, network functions are divided into two classes of essential (i.e., core) functions and additive (i.e., service) functions. Core functions need active backups and cannot tolerate any failure. However, additive funct…
Transmission power systems usually consist of interconnected sub-grids that are operated relatively independently. When a failure happens, it is desirable to localize its impact within the sub-grid where the failure occurs. This paper introduces three interface networks to connect sub-grids, achieving better failure localization while maintaining robust network connectivity. The proposed interface networks are validated with numerical experiments on the IEEE 118-bus test network under both DC and AC power flow models.
Transmission line failures in power systems propagate non-locally, making the control of the resulting outages extremely difficult. In this work, we establish a mathematical theory that characterizes the patterns of line failure propagation and localization in terms of network graph structure. It provides a novel perspective on distribution factors that precisely captures Kirchhoff's Law in terms of topological structures. Our results show that the distribution of specific collections of subtrees of the transmission network plays a critical role on the patterns of power redistribution, and mot…
Transmission line failures in power systems propagate and cascade non-locally. This well-known yet counter-intuitive feature makes it even more challenging to optimally and reliably operate these complex networks. In this work we present a comprehensive framework based on spectral graph theory that fully and rigorously captures how multiple simultaneous line failures propagate, distinguishing between non-cut and cut set outages. Using this spectral representation of power systems, we identify the crucial graph sub-structure that ensures line failure localization -- the network bridge-block dec…
Transmission line failure in power systems prop-agate non-locally, making the control of the resulting outages extremely difficult. In Part II of this paper, we continue the study of line failure localizability in transmission networks and characterize the impact of cut set outages. We establish a Simple Path Criterion, showing that the propagation pattern due to bridge outages, a special case of cut set failures, are fully determined by the positions in the network of the buses that participate in load balancing. We then extend our results to general cut set outages. In contrast to non-cut ou…
GEIRI North America（美国GEIRI北美公司）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）
This paper proposes a cascading failure mitigation strategy based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) method. Firstly, the principles of RL are introduced. Then, the Multi-Stage Cascading Failure (MSCF) problem is presented and its challenges are investigated. The problem is then tackled by the RL based on DC-OPF (Optimal Power Flow). Designs of the key elements of the RL framework (rewards, states, etc.) are also discussed in detail. Experiments on the IEEE 118-bus system by both shallow and deep neural networks demonstrate promising results in terms of reduced system collapse rates.
