Towards a Universal Approach for Identifying Cascading Failures of Power Grids

Abstract: Due to the evolving nature of power systems and the complicated coupling relationship of power devices, it has been a great challenge to identify the contingencies that could trigger cascading blackouts of power systems. This paper aims to develop a universal approach for identifying the initial disruptive contingencies that can result in the worst-case cascading failures of power grids. The problem of contingency identification is formulated in a unified mathematical framework, and it can be solved by the Jacobian-Free Newton-Krylov (JFNK) method in order to circumvent the Jacobian matrix and relieve the computational burden. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to validate the proposed identification approach on the IEEE $118$ Bus System.