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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
Blackouts of the electric power transmission infrastructure are complicated cascading events in a huge network with diverse, interacting failures. In these cascading failures, a series of dependent failures successively weaken the system and making further failures more likely. The cascading causes power law and criticality phenomena in blackout statistics. One contention is that we should study not arbitrary networks, but engineered networks, and we outline a complex systems simulation approach to generate "engineered" data when this data is not otherwise available. We model cascading in a bulk statistical fashion as initial failures propagating probabilistically according to a branching process. We estimate branching process parameters from data and hence estimate the probability of cascading failures of various sizes. Initial testing of these methods on real and simulated data open the possibility that the probabilities of large blackouts could be practically estimated from power system observations or non-exhaustive simulation runs.
Host: Misha Chertkov, T-4