Management of Cascading Outage Risk Based on Risk Gradient and Markovian Tree Search

Since cascading outages are major threats to power systems, it is important to reduce the risk of potential cascading outages. In this paper, a risk management method of cascading outages based on Markovian tree search is proposed. With the tree expansion on the cascading outage risk, risk gradient is computed efficiently by a forward-backward tree search scheme with good convergence, and it is then employed in an optimization model to minimize control cost while effectively reducing the cascading outage risk. To overcome the limitation with linearization in computing risk gradient, an iterative risk management (IRM) approach is further developed. Tests on the RTS-96 3-area system verify the accuracy of the computed risk gradient and its effectiveness for risk reduction. Time performance of the proposed IRM approach is tested on the RTS-96 system, a 410-bus U.S.-Canada northeast system, and a 1354-bus mid-European system, and demonstrates its potentials for decision support on practical power systems online or on hourly basis.