Your Last Name: Sumaria

Your First Name: Vedant

Your Access ID: vps5
Speakers Last Name: Yaan
Speakers First Name: Osman
Title of Talk: Robustness of electrical power systems against cascading
failures: optimal load-capacity distributions and hardness of attacking
Date of Talk: 08/25/2016

What was the principle theme of this talk?

The principle theme of the talk was to discuss the robustness of power systems
against cascading failures initiated by a random attack.
The reason of the study was the vulnerabilities of Electrical power systems that
have raised great concern due to several recent large-scale blackouts around the
world.

What technical problems were discussed?

The technical problems that were discussed are:
1. Electrical Power systems are among the most complex technological
systems ever developed and thus it is often difficult to understand it fully.
2. It is difficult to understand the inter and intra- dependencies with various
parts of the system and thus difficult to predict their behavior under external
attacks or random failures.
3. The concern for the robustness of the power grid have grown recently
because of several large-scale blackouts such as that in India where across
22 states in Northern, Eastern and Northeast India in 2012. This was the
largest power outage in history.
4. The large-scale blackouts are often attributed to this initial shock getting
escalated due to the intricate dependencies within a power system.
5. This process may continue recursively and lead to a cascade of failures,
which may potentially breakdown the entire system.

What approach was used to tackle the problem?

The possible approaches to solve the problems can be divided in the following
ways:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Nonlinear AC model
Linear DC power flow model
Probability/ Epidemic/ Percolation Band Failure Models
Local load redistribution models
Global load redistribution model

They assume that when a line fails, its load (i.e., flow) is redistributed equally
among all other lines.
The equal load redistribution model has the ability to capture the long-range nature
of the Kirchhoffs law, at least in the mean-field sense, as opposed to the
topological models where failed load is redistributed only locally among
neighboring lines.

What are some competing approaches that you can think of?
Cascaded Load Cut-off (CLC), Cascaded Load Overflow (CLO) and AdaptiveCascaded Load Overflow (A-CLO) are few approaches that would be effective in
improving the robustness of networks.
Various simulation studies can be done to find the best possible method among
these.

What future developments are envisioned in this area?

Future Contingency Analysis would be an enhanced application that takes
advantage of the improved communications architecture being defined by
IntelliGrid Architecture for the future.
It will use wide area data and other data to improve its reliability, and to analyze
power system security (safe and stable operation) for a wide operating region.
Future Contingency Analysis will also incorporate intelligence features to resolve
execution problems by using its knowledge base of previous experience in solving
difficult situations.

What did you think of the presentation?

The presentation was short and emphasized clearly on the key ideas.
It was structured well and each part was clearly delineated.
It was explained such that a student with less background in the field could also
understand well, which made it interesting for the audience.

Given another opportunity, what questions would you like to ask the speaker
(formulate at least one)?
The questions I would have asked to the speaker would be:
1. How are we predicting the randomness of attack on the system and how well
is the probability defined for the attack to occur?
2. How practically this simulation work can be implemented in the real world
system?