A Cascading Failure Model of Power Systems Considering Components’ Multi-State Failures

It is critical to understand the cascading failure mechanisms and assess the performance of power systems under different types of natural disasters. This paper proposes a cascading failure model of power systems based on Alternating Current (AC) optimal power flow with components' multi-state failures. On the basis of the traditional cascading failure model, the proposed model considers each component's various failure states and different performance levels of each state of power systems. Meanwhile, active disconnection and passive failure of each component are considered. The proposed cascading failure model can be used as a guidance for the developing power systems' disaster recovery strategy. Then, the proposed evaluation metric for the scale of the system's cascading failure incorporates three factors, i.e., the number of working components, the amount of power flowing, and the topology of the system. Finally, taking earthquake disaster as an example, this paper provides the method to simulate natural disaster of the central type. The proposed disaster simulation method can be extended to other two types of natural disasters, such as the unilateral type (e.g., hurricane, etc.) and the global type (e.g., snowstorm, etc.). In addition, the intensity and distribution of the disaster, the attenuation of the intensity, the location of the disaster occurrence, as well as the vulnerability and physical location of each component are considered in this method. The IEEE 30-bus model is used as a testbed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed modeling methods. The proposed evaluation metric is also compared with the traditional one.