Power system cascading risk assessment based on complex network theory

When a single failure occurs in a vulnerable part of a power system, this may cause a large area cascading event. Therefore, an advanced method that can assess the risks during cascading events is needed. In this paper, an improved complex network model for power system risk assessment is proposed. Risk is defined by consequence and probability of the failures in this model, which are affected by both power factors and network structure. Compared with existing risk assessment models, the proposed one can evaluate the risk of the system comprehensively during a cascading event by combining the topological and electrical information. A new cascading event simulation module is adopted to identify the power grid cascading chain from a system-level view. In addition, simulations are investigated on the IEEE 14 bus system and IEEE 39 bus system respectively to illustrate the performance of the proposed module. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in a power grid risk assessment during cascading event.