Critical States Identiffcation in Power System via Lattice Partition and Its Application in Reliability Assessment

Abstract: With the increasing complexity of power systems,accurately identifying critical states (the states corresponding to minimal cut sets) and assessing system reliability have become crucial tasks. In this paper, a mathematical lattice structure is employed to represent and partition the state space of power system. Based on this structure, a novel recursive method is proposed to efffciently identify critical states by leveraging lattice partitioning and Optimal Power Flow(OPF) calculations. This method not only enables the extension of failure system states,but also calculates the upper and lower bounds of the Loss of Load Probability (LOLP) in a progressively converging manner. Compared to traditional reliability assessment methods such as State Enumeration (SE) and Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS), this approach offers greater accuracy and efffciency. Experiments conducted on the RBTS and RTS79 systems demonstrate that the proposed method accurately identiffes all critical states up to a preset order, which are high-risk states. The contribution of these critical states to LOLP highlights their signiffcance in the system. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the analytical value with signiffcantly fewer OPF calculations in RBTS system, reaching acceptable precision of LOLP up to 100 times faster than SE in both the RBTS and RTS systems.