Review on power system cascading failure thoeries and studies

A large number of blackouts have happened in power system recently, and most of them are cascading outages. Because of their severe consequences, a variety of methods are proposed to study the mechanism of cascading outages. These methods can be divided into four categories: self-organized critical theory, complex network theory, operational reliability theory, and power system simulation theory. This article reviewed the researches on cascading outages, and pointed out some important research achievements and their drawbacks.