Identification of top contributors to system vulnerability via an ordinal optimization based method

This paper presents a novel approach to identify top contributors to power systems failure when considering cascade failure events. Implementation of this approach can help for a better system understanding to system stakeholders, provide internal and external situational awareness to operators, and help as a diagnostic support tool. Given the few studies that concurrently consider cascade models with models for identifying top contributors to load shed, this paper presents a novel hybrid approach combining an evaluation phase - a cascade model together with an approximate evaluation of the damage induced (in terms of load shed) by a collapse event - and an ordinal optimization perspective, to identify top component failure contributors. The approach is implemented in the Italian high-voltage (380 kV) electrical transmission network and results are compared against current topological measures of system vulnerability.