Impact of Topology on the Propagation of Cascading Failure in Power Grid

In the past two decades the frequent occurrences of large scale blackouts and catastrophic events has reduced the reliability of power grid to a great extent. A thorough analysis of the propagation of failures, in terms of line outages, combined with the topological characteristics of the grid aids, has been done to take corrective actions to save the system from complete collapse. It also helps to investigate the progress and understand the nature and intensity of blackouts. This motivates to establish the relationship between the network topological characteristics and cascading failure in the power grid. In this paper, the basic topological characteristics of the power network are studied in detail and the average propagation of failure under varying topological conditions is calculated as a branching process parameter. The variation in the mean propagation is studied in detail using a number of test bed networks with the alternate realistic networks derived from the standard IEEE networks imitating the real network conditions. The results confirm a qualitative agreement between the variations in topological parameter and the failure propagation rate in the cascading regime. Based on the analysis mentioned above, data clearly shows that the average failure propagation factor varies linearly with the variations in the statistical metrics.