Authors: MOJTABA FEKRI, JAVAD NIKOUKAR, GEVORK BABAMALEK GHAREHPETIAN

Abstract: In power systems, the unintentional outage of a grid element can lead to overload and outage of other equipment and, through a domino effect, all or a large part of a power system may collapse. The resulting events are called cascading, consecutive, or sequential failures. So far, various methods have been proposed to identify the initial events of cascading failures with different levels of accuracy and computational load. In this paper, an effective approach is employed which, by calculating the maximum flow of independent paths between generators and loads in the network graph, identifies the critical lines and transformers of the network so-called the initial events of cascade failures. To validate this method, the enumeration method is utilized. The proposed method is implemented in IEEE 118-bus test system and the results are indicative of its efficiency, accuracy and fastness compared to other methods.

Keywords: Initial events, cascading failures, maximum flow, vulnerability index, enumeration method, contingency

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