Control of cascading failures in dynamical models of power grids

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed control strategy for power grids modeled with complex networks and nonlinear dynamics, effectively preventing cascading failures caused by line overloads in various grid models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control protocol based on the network topology to prevent cascading failures in power grid models.

Findings

The control method successfully prevents cascades in multiple power grid models.

It can control either all nodes or a subset of nodes to stop failures.

The approach is effective across different grid sizes and configurations.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a distributed control strategy to prevent dynamically-induced cascading failures in power grids. We model power grids using complex networks and nonlinear dynamics to provide a coarse-grained description of the electro-mechanical phenomena taking place on them (in particular, we use coupled swing equations) and restrict our analysis to cascades of line failures, i.e., failures due to power flows exceeding the maximum capacity of a line. We formulate a distributed control protocol relying on the same topology of the physical layer and apply it to several power grid models, including a small-size illustrative example with five nodes, the Italian high-voltage (380kV) power grid, and the IEEE 118-bus system. Our results indicate that the approach is capable of preventing cascading failures, either controlling each node of the network or a suitable subset of them.