Vulnerability Analysis of Power Transmission Grids Subject to Cascading Failures

Cascading failures are a major threat to interconnected systems, such as electrical power transmission networks. Typically, approaches proposed for devising optimized control strategies are demonstrated with reference to a few test systems of reference (IEEE systems). However, this limits the robustness of the proposed strategies with respect to different power grid structures. Recently, this issue has been addressed by considering synthetic networks randomly generated for mimicking power transmission grids' characteristics. These networks can be used for investigating the vulnerability of power networks to cascading failures. In this work, we propose to apply a recent algorithm for sampling random power grid topologies with realistic electrical parameters and further extend it to the random allocation of generation and load. Integration with a realistic cascade simulation tool, then, allows us to perform thorough statistical analyses of power grids with respect to their cascading failure behavior, thus offering a powerful tool for identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different grid classes. New metrics for ranking the control and mitigation effort requirements of individual cascade scenarios and/or of grid configurations are defined and computed. Finally, genetic algorithms are used to identify strategies to improve the robustness of existing power networks.