Identification and Analysis of Cascading Failures in Power Grids with Protective Actions

This paper aims to identify and analyze the initial contingencies or disturbances that could lead to the worst-case cascading failures of power grids. An optimal control approach is proposed to determine the most disruptive disturbances on the branch of power transmission system by regarding the disturbances as the control inputs. Moreover, protective actions such as load shedding and generation dispatch are taken into account in a convex optimization framework to prevent the cascading outages of power grids. In theory, the necessary conditions for identifying the most disruptive disturbances are obtained by solving an integrated system of algebraic equations. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to validate the proposed approach on the IEEE RTS 24 Bus System.