Risk Assessment of Multi-Timescale Cascading Outages Based on Markovian Tree Search

TLDR: The Markovian tree model is reformulated from the quasi-dynamic multitimescale simulation model proposed recently to ensure reasonable modeling and simulation of cascading outages and a risk estimation index is proposed to guide the search for states with major contributions to the risk.

Abstract: In the risk assessment of cascading outages, the rationality of simulation and efficiency of computation are both of great significance. To overcome the drawback of sampling-based methods that huge computation resources are required and the shortcoming of initial contingency selection practices that the dependencies in sequences of outages are omitted, this paper proposes a novel risk assessment approach by searching on Markovian Tree. The Markovian tree model is reformulated from the quasi-dynamic multitimescale simulation model proposed recently to ensure reasonable modeling and simulation of cascading outages. Then, a tree search scheme is established to avoid duplicated simulations on same cascade paths, significantly saving the computation time. To accelerate the convergence of a risk assessment, a risk estimation index is proposed to guide the search for states with major contributions to the risk, and the risk assessment is realized based on the risk estimation index with a forward tree search and backward update algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated on a four-node power system, and its convergence profile as well as efficiency is demonstrated on the RTS-96 test system.