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

## TL;DR

This paper presents an optimal control-based method to identify initial disturbances that could cause cascading failures in power grids and incorporates protective actions to prevent outages, validated through simulations.

## Contribution

It introduces a convex optimization framework that integrates protective actions into the analysis of cascading failures in power grids, providing a novel approach to mitigation.

## Key findings

- Successfully identifies the most disruptive disturbances using the proposed method.
- Demonstrates effectiveness of protective actions like load shedding in simulations.
- Validates approach on IEEE RTS 24 Bus System.

## Abstract

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.