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Probabilistic
Probabilistic power system power system
security analysis considering security analysis

protection failures 35
Xingbin Yu and Chanan Singh
Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University,
Texas, USA
Keywords Electric power systems, Reliability management
Abstract This paper proposes a method of probabilistic security analysis of power systems
including protection system failures. Protection system failure is the main cause of cascading
outages. A protection system reliability model including two major protection failure modes is
adopted to demonstrate the effects of different protection failure modes on power system reliability.
The mechanism and scheme of protection system have been analyzed for their contribution to
cascading outages as well as system stability after a fault occurs. All contingencies and responses in
the power system are depicted in their inherent stochastic manner. Therefore, all simulations in
this paper contain the features of a real power system. Non-sequential Monte Carlo simulation
approach is used to implement the stochastic properties of component contingencies and protection
system failures. The WSCC-9 bus system is used as the security test system. The security index
“probability of stability” is calculated to quantify the vulnerability of a power system under
cascading outages.

1. Introduction
Primary, backup and certain special protection devices and schemes have been
designed in such a fashion that when a contingence occurs in the power system,
the protection system should securely isolate the faulted component from the
healthy system. During the development of the modern power systems,
protection system dependability has taken priority over global system security.
In most reliability analysis, protection systems are generally assumed to be
perfectly reliable. As a matter of fact, protection system itself is a complicated
system comprising of a number of components, each of which has probability
of failure. While reinforcing the protection complexity to guarantee the system
dependability, the risk of incorrect operation of protection system increases as
well. Though considerable progress has been made in power system reliability
modeling and computational methods, only recently serious efforts were
initiated to study the effect of protection system on power system reliability.
There is more and more evidence that protection systems play a role in the
origin and propagation of major power system disturbances. A study by North
American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) shows that protective relays are COMPEL: The International Journal
for Computation and Mathematics in
involved in about 75 percent of major disturbances. Normally, power system Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Vol. 23 No. 1, 2004
pp. 35-47
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from Texas Advanced Technology Program, 0332-1649
USA. DOI 10.1108/03321640410507536
COMPEL blackouts result from cascading failures. There are many blackout cases in
23,1 history such as New York City blackout in July 1977 and Southern Idaho
system instability on 14 December 1995. In 1996, Western System Coordinating
Council (WSCC) suffered two blackouts. One on 2nd July was initiated by a
flashover near a 345 kV transmission line and its protection operated
incorrectly and triggered the tripping of two units nearby, which led to parts of
36 WSCC system operating below WSCC Minimum Operating Reliability Criteria.
Another on 10th August was a false tripping that caused 30,000 MW load and
27,000 MW generation loss and 7.5 million customers were without power
(WSCC, 1996). All these blackouts are related to protection system hidden
failures, which remain dormant when everything is normal and are exposed as
a result of other system disturbances (Phadke and Thorp, 1996). Large-scale
power system blackout is a rare event. However, when it occurs, the impact on
the system is catastrophic (Tamronglak et al., 1996). Currently, some studies
have been made on the origin and development of cascading outages, their
impact and preventive actions (Bae and Thorp, 1998; Pepyne et al., 2001;
Tamronglak et al., 1996; Wang and Thorp, 2001). Most of the work was based
on adequacy reliability analysis without considering the transient behavior of
the cascading outages. As a matter of fact, transient impact might interact with
particular protection and control mechanisms in such a way that it could cause
or worsen cascading outages. Furthermore, stability is an important index that
represents the system tolerance to contingencies. Therefore, it is necessary to
develop dynamic reliability study methodology concerning the protection
system failures.

2. Protection failure modes and cascading outages

Protection system has two major failure modes: “failure to operate” and
“undesired tripping” (Singh and Patton, 1980). The former means that when a
fault occurs in a power system, the protection system refuses to operate to clear
the fault. In practice, phenomenon of stuck breaker is included in this mode.
The latter refers to either spontaneous operation in the absence of a fault or trip
for faults outside the protection zone.
A cascading outage refers to a series of tripping initiated by one component
failure in the system. When a fault occurs, the impact on the system such as
over-current or voltage drop may cause some protection devices to operate
incorrectly. Two types of protection system failures mentioned earlier are the
major cause of cascading outages. Based on real life protection scenario,
“failure to operate” will directly cause at least one bus isolation in the system.
There are two types of “undesired tripping”, one is “spectral tripping” that
occurs in the absence of a fault, another is “tripping for faults outside the
protection zone”. Spectral tripping can be remedied immediately by
auto-recloser. Since there is no fault involved and restoration is prompt, this
case does not have significant effect on the system stability. Tripping for faults
outside the protection zone is the main cause of the cascading outages. We will Probabilistic
only focus on this kind of undesired trip in this paper. power system
security analysis
3. Transient stability modeling
3.1 Component/Protection system model
A modified model of current-carrying component paired with its associated
protection system was proposed recently ( Yu and Singh, 2002). This model
37
differentiates the protection failure modes as two states: “undesired trip” and
“failure to trip”. When a component is in these two states, its protection system
is suffering from hidden failure and is at risk to misoperate. Different failure
modes will lead to different responses to contingencies and therefore have
different contributions to the system stability. Using this model, we can derive
each state probability as input for subsequent simulation.
The occurrence of cascading outages results not only from the existence of
hidden protection failures, but is also related to system fault and running
conditions. Bae and Thorp (1998) proposed hidden failure probability of
exposed line tripping incorrectly as a function of impedance seen by the relay.
In this paper, we introduce some simplification for the probability properties.
We use distance protection zone 3 for the purpose of including protection
failure. The probability as a function of protection zone impedance is shown in
Figure 1.
Similarly, over-current protection zone 3 is incorporated to represent
protection failure too. The probability property is shown in Figure 2.

3.2 Probabilistic representation

The aim of power system stability study is to check the system’s ability of
maintaining synchronism under system contingencies. To evaluate power
system stability, probabilistic factors must be considered (Aboreshaid et al.,
1996). There are many uncertainties in terms of system contingencies and

Figure 1.
Distance protection
failure probability of
exposed line
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Figure 2.
Over-current protection
failure probability of
exposed line

corresponding responses. Their stochastic features will be included in our

stability evaluation.
(1) Type of fault. A variety of contingencies might happen in a power
system. As for the stability analysis, however, we assume all faults to be
three-phase. This strategy is somewhat conservative, but is reasonable
and practical.
(2) Location of fault. The probability of fault occurrence on one transmission
line is directly proportional to its length. On the particular faulted line,
the fault location follows uniform distribution model.
(3) Fault-clearing time. A normal probability distribution model is used to
represent the fault-clearing time.
(4) Reclosing time. The probabilities associated with the auto-reclosing time
are assumed to be normally distributed.
(5) Fault duration. It is assumed having Rayleigh distribution.

3.3 Stability analysis model

For the shortcomings of the commonly used critical clearing time (CCT) method
for transient analysis including random fault location and auto-reclosing
(Huang and Li, 2001), we choose swing-equation model to handle stability
analysis directly. A typical swing-equation model includes second-order
differential equations associated with generator buses and algebraic equations
for other buses. For generator buses, we have equation (1):
M i d€i þ Di d_i ¼ P mi 2 P gi i ¼ 1; . . .; n ð1Þ
where di is the generator rotor angle; Pmi is the mechanical power input; Pgi is
the electrical power input; n is the number of generators; Mi is the
ith-generator’s inertia coefficient and Di is the ith-generator’s damping
coefficient.
 Mechanical power Pmi is equal to the prefault electrical power, which can be Probabilistic
obtained by power flow calculation. Electric power output is given by power system
equation (2): security analysis
X
n
P gi ¼ jV i jjV j jjY ij jcosðuij 2 di þ dj Þ i ¼ 1; . . .; n ð2Þ
j¼1 39
where Yij is the reduced bus admittance matrix.

3.4 Assumptions
(1) Failure to operate and undesired trip of the protection system failure do
not overlap. That means whenever hidden protection failure exists, it
will reside either in state of “undesired tripping” or state of “failure to
operate”.
(2) When component fails, the protection system does not fail.
(3) All failures are mutually independent. Failures of the protection system
are independent of the failures of the component.
(4) Generators’ mechanical power Pmi is constant during the transient
procedure.
4. Methodology of implementation
4.1 Cascading outage sequences
If part of the network is shown in Figure 3, then the event tree in Figure 4
shows the cascading outage sequence.
(1) A fault occurs on transmission line L1. Lines L2-L5 are exposed lines and
are at risk to misoperate.
(2) Breakers 1A and 1B trip, no hidden failure for protection system
associated with line L1. Fault is cleared.

Figure 3.
Sample network
COMPEL
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Figure 4.
Possible event-tree for
cascading outages

(3) Breaker 1A trips whereas 1B does not due to “failure to operate”, such as
stuck breaker.
(4) Breakers 1A and 1B reclose successfully for temporary fault.
(5) Breakers 1A and 1B reclose unsuccessfully for permanent fault.
(6) Backup protection operates to trip breakers 2A and 3A.
(7) L1 back to service. Breakers 2A and 2B trip provided there is hidden
failure (“undesired tripping”) on the protection system associated with
line L2.
(8) Breaker 1A and 1B trip again. Breakers 2A and 2B trip provided there is
hidden failure (“undesired tripping”) on the protection system associated
with line L2.
(9) Breaker 6A and 6B trip provided there is hidden failure (“undesired
tripping”) on the protection system associated with line L6.
It should be noted that event-tree in Figure 4 does not exhaust all possible event
paths. On the contrary, it just gives an example to describe the sequence of
cascading outages due to protection system failure. In Figure 4, events 6-9
indicate the cascading outage resulting from protection system hidden failures.
The series of outages will keep extending in the inherent probabilistic manner
until no more new outage occurs or certain criterion is reached.

4.2 Analysis session

(1) Fault session. Fault remains in the system and protection system takes
action under fault situation. During the fault session, all neighboring
components in the system suffer from impact as well. This is the most
dangerous period for the exposure of unrevealed failures. Therefore,
fault analysis is conducted in this session till the fault is eventually
cleared. The events in this session include events 1-6 in Figure 4.
(2) After-fault session. After the fault is cleared, system enters after-fault
session, in which transient phenomenon is still going on, but no fault
 exists any longer. In this session, cascading outage probability is mainly Probabilistic
associated with the exposed lines’ over-current resulted from network power system
topology changes. Therefore, we apply power flow analysis in this security analysis
session to figure out the following cascading events.

4.3 Monte Carlo simulation

Except for event 6, all other occurrences of events in Figure 4 are based on the 41
probabilistic feature of its model as described earlier. Event 6, as the result of
event-3, simply shows the certainty of backup protection scheme for “failure to
operate”. However, the origin of “failure to operate” (event 3) already embodies
the probabilistic feature. Therefore, entire cascading procedure is incorporated
with a series of stochastic processes, reflecting the true picture of events in the
power system.
Monte Carlo simulation method is utilized in this paper because it can handle
complicated stochastic problems in a more realistic manner. Simulation flow
chart is shown in Figure 5.

4.4 Assumptions in simulation

In calculations, we are only concerned about the distance protection zone 3 and
over-current zone 3. We choose zone 3 impedance setting as 250 percent of the
line impedance; zone 3 over-current setting as 10 percent of the rated secondary
current of the current transformer (CT).
Besides the above description, additional assumptions are made as follows.
(1) Generator and transformer are treated as one unit whose failure rate is
the sum of their individual failure rates.
(2) For the initial fault, only first-order contingency is considered.

5. Methodology of application
5.1 Test system
We use WSCC-9 bus system as the test system (shown in Figure 6). As it is not
complex, it clearly provides insight into stability analysis regarding cascading
outages.

5.2 Reliability data

Tables I-III provide reliability data for the calculations (Billinton and
Aboreshaid, 1995; Huang and Li, 2001).
All backup protection operating time follow normal probability distribution
with mean 0.8 s and variance 0.1 s.

5.3 Simulation results

5.3.1 In-process results. Stability evaluation can be observed from individual
Monte Carlo simulation process. Some typical cases have been selected and
their corresponding stability evaluations have been performed as below.
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Figure 5.
Monte Carlo simulation
for probability of
stability

Case 1. Fault at 0.01 of line k8, 9l (close to bus 8), fault cleared at 0.06 s,
unsuccessful reclosing at 0.8 s system is stable as shown in Figure 7.
Case 2. Fault at 0.1 of line k8, 9l, stuck breaker occurred at bus 9. System is
unstable as shown in Figure 8.
Case 3. Fault at 0.9 of line k8, 9l, fault cleared at 0.10 s, unsuccessful
reclosing at 0.8 s, cascading outage of line k9, 4l. System is stable as shown in
Figure 9.
5.3.2 Probability of stability. Probability of stability is the final result from
Monte Carlo simulation, which is composed of large number of individual
 Probabilistic
power system
security analysis

43

Figure 6.
WSCC-9 bus system

Line Type of distribution Mean time (s) Variance (s)

1 Normal 0.09 0.01

2 Normal 0.08 0.01
3 Normal 0.07 0.01
4 Normal 0.06 0.01 Table I.
5 Normal 0.05 0.01 Fault-clearing time
6 Normal 0.05 0.01 probability distribution

Line Type of distribution k

1 Rayleigh 0.30
2 Rayleigh 0.40
3 Rayleigh 0.35
4 Rayleigh 0.30 Table II.
5 Rayleigh 0.40 Fault duration
6 Rayleigh 0.35 probability distribution

Line Type of distribution Mean time (s) Variance (s)

1 Normal 0.6 0.02

2 Normal 0.8 0.02
3 Normal 0.7 0.02
4 Normal 0.6 0.02 Table III.
5 Normal 0.9 0.02 Fault reclosing time
6 Normal 0.7 0.02 probability distribution
COMPEL
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Figure 7.
Case 1: machine phase
angle

Figure 8.
Case 2: machine phase
angle
 Probabilistic
power system
security analysis

45

Figure 9.
Case 3: machine phase
angle

process sampling and evaluation. The numerical results of the process are
shown in Figure 10.

5.4 Observations
The high probability of stability value indicates that WSCC-9 bus system is a
stability reliable system. In fact, this can also be concluded from the in-process
case study since the cases are relatively severe and most of them can still
remain stable. Stuck breaker, resulting in long lasting fault time, has the
biggest impact on the system stability.

6. Conclusion and future work

In this paper, transient stability analysis has been conducted with the
occurrence of cascading outages in the power system. Explicit models of
component, protection system and scheme have been established to reflect
probabilistic features of the power system. Based on those models, a Monte
Carlo simulation approach is developed to simulate system transient
behavior under cascading outages. Reliability index of probability of
stability considering protection failure can be used to scale system
transient stability.
COMPEL
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Figure 10.
Probability of stability
result

Different power systems may have different stability performance due to their
different network topologies, installation capacities, and protection
character/scenarios.
Protection failures are rare events in power system. This can be noticed by
the long time taken by simulation to converge. Some variance reduction
techniques could be applied to reduce simulation time.
The methodology presented in this paper will be validated in the future on a
larger test system that closely represents real power system.

References
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