Milorad Papic

Risk Assessment of Cascading Outages: Methodologies and Challenges

Cascading outages can cause large blackouts, and a variety of methods are emerging to study this challenging topic. The Task Force on Understanding, Prediction, Mitigation, and Restoration of Cascading Failures, under the IEEE PES Computer Analytical Methods Subcommittee (CAMS), seeks to consolidate and review the progress of the field towards methods and tools of assessing the risk of cascading failure. This paper discusses the challenges of cascading failure and summarizes a variety of state-of-the-art analysis and simulation methods, including analyzing observed data, and simulations relying on various probabilistic, deterministic, approximate, and heuristic approaches. Limitations to the interpretation and application of analytical results are highlighted, and directions and challenges for future developments are discussed.

Vulnerability assessment for cascading failures in electric power systems

Cascading failures present severe threats to power grid security, and thus vulnerability assessment of power grids is of significant importance. Focusing on analytic methods, this paper reviews the state of the art of vulnerability assessment methods in the context of cascading failures. These methods are based on steady-state power grid modeling or high-level probabilistic modeling. The impact of emerging technologies including phasor technology, high-performance computing techniques, and visualization techniques on the vulnerability assessment of cascading failures is then addressed, and future research directions are presented.

Survey of tools for risk assessment of cascading outages

This paper is a result of ongoing activity carried out by Understanding, Prediction, Mitigation and Restoration of Cascading Failures Task Force under IEEE Computer Analytical Methods Subcommittee (CAMS). The task forces previous papers [1, 2] are focused on general aspects of cascading outages such as understanding, prediction, prevention and restoration from cascading failures. This is the second of two new papers, which extend this previous work to summarize the state of the art in cascading failure risk analysis methodologies and modeling tools. The first paper reviews the state of the art in methodologies for performing risk assessment of potential cascading outages [3]. This paper describes the state of the art in cascading failure modeling tools, documenting the view of experts representing utilities, universities and consulting companies. The paper is intended to constitute a valid source of information and references about presently available tools that deal with prediction of cascading failure events. This effort involves reviewing published literature and other documentation from vendors, universities and research institutions. The assessment of cascading outages risk evaluation is in continuous evolution. Investigations to gain even better understanding and identification of cascading events are the subject of several research programs underway aimed at solving the complexity of these events that electrical utilities face today. Assessing the risk of cascading failure events in planning and operation for power transmission systems require adequate mathematical tools/software.

Risk assessment of cascading outages: Part I — Overview of methodologies

This paper is a result of ongoing activity carried out by Understanding, Prediction, Mitigation and Restoration of Cascading Failures Task Force under IEEE Computer Analytical Methods Subcommittee (CAMS). The task forces previous papers are focused on general aspects of cascading outages such as understanding, prediction, prevention and restoration from cascading failures. This is the first of two new papers, which extend this previous work to summarize the state of the art in cascading failure risk analysis methodologies and modeling tools. This paper is intended to be a reference document to summarize the state of the art in the methodologies for performing risk assessment of cascading outages caused by some initiating event(s). A risk assessment should cover the entire potential chain of cascades starting with the initiating event(s) and ending with some final condition(s). However, this is a difficult task and heuristic approaches and approximations have been suggested. This paper discusses different approaches to this and suggests directions for future development of methodologies. The second paper summarizes the state of the art in modeling tools for risk assessment of cascading outages.

Mitigation and prevention of cascading outages: Methodologies and practical applications

Interconnected power grids throughout the world are very reliable but occasionally suffer massive blackouts with multibillion dollar costs to society. Cascading failures present severe threats to power grid reliability, and thus reducing their likelihood, mitigation and prevention is of significant importance. This paper is one in a series presented by Cascading Failures Task Force, under the IEEE PES Computer Analytical Methods Subcommittee (CAMS) with primary focus on mitigation and prevention of cascading outages. The paper presents the basic methodologies for mitigation, summarizes currently deployed special protection schemes, and lists cases of successful and unsuccessful mitigation of cascading outages and lessons learned. Future developments and challenges in the area of mitigating cascading outages are also discussed.

Benchmarking and Validation of Cascading Failure Analysis Tools

Cascading failure in electric power systems is a complicated problem for which a variety of models, software tools, and analytical tools have been proposed but are difficult to verify. Benchmarking and validation are necessary to understand how closely a particular modeling method corresponds to reality, what engineering conclusions may be drawn from a particular tool, and what improvements need to be made to the tool in order to reach valid conclusions. The community needs to develop the test cases tailored to cascading that are central to practical benchmarking and validation. In this paper, the IEEE PES working group on cascading failure reviews and synthesizes how benchmarking and validation can be done for cascading failure analysis, summarizes and reviews the cascading test cases that are available to the international community, and makes recommendations for improving the state of the art.

Overview of Common Mode outages in power systems

This paper is a result of ongoing activity carried out by Probability Applications for Common Mode Events (PACME) Task Force under the Reliability Risk and Probability Applications (RRPA) Subcommittee. The paper is intended to constitute a valid source of information and references about dealing with common-mode outages in power systems reliability analysis. This effort involves reviewing published literature and presenting state-of-the-art research and practical applications in the area of common-mode outages. Evaluation of available outage statistics show that there is a definite need for collective effort from academia and industry to not only recommend procedures for data collection and monitoring but also to provide appropriate mathematical models to assess such events.

A novel statistical-based analysis of WECC bulk transmission reliability data

This paper has presented a new statistical-based approach for analyzing the transmission outage data. The method is applied to the WECC TRD outage data collected by member utilities across Western Interconnection since 2006. The developed model takes into account the random nature of outages and fifteen factors/ variables classified as: categorical, indicator, and explanatory. The main goal of the paper is to evaluate if sufficient operational and maintenance data has been collected to obtain statistically valid results. Concepts associated with the statistical validation of performance indices are discussed with particular emphasis placed on analysis of various types of explanatory variables such as voltage class, length, conductors per phase, number of terminals, circuits per structure, insulator type, structure, terrain and elevation.

Effects of dependent and common mode outages on the reliability of bulk electric system - Part II: Outage data analysis

A companion paper (Part I) presents the basic concepts of dependent and common mode outages, the causes for their origins in the bulk electric system (BES) and the subsequent effects from a reliability perspective. This paper describes the practical outage data collection efforts in vogue in North America and parts of Europe, with particular emphasis on outage data statistics corresponding to dependent and common mode outages. The goal is to eventually be able to obtain standard, representative reliability indices for typical transmission elements such as lines and transformers from the available outage data.

Research on Common-Mode and Dependent (CMD) Outage Events in Power Systems: A Review

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of some fundamental concepts and practical applications in the area of common-mode and dependent (CMD) outage events in power systems. The paper is a result of ongoing activity carried out by the Probability Applications for Common and dependent Mode Events (PACME) Working Group (WG) of the Reliability, Risk and Probability Applications Subcommittee. The PACME WG was formed in 2010 to review, advance, and present the research and practical applications in the area of CMD outage events. This paper presents state-of-the-art in research, modeling, and applications of CMD outage events in power system planning and operation. Issues considered include: data monitoring and collection, and probabilistic modeling and evaluation in the planning, and operation of power generation and transmission systems. Additionally, some results obtained from outage data statistics corresponding to CMD outage events in systems such as Generating Availability Data System, Transmission Availability Data System, and Canadian Electrical Association are presented.