| Description | Data-Driven Models of Cascading Blackouts in Electric Power Transmission Networks
The large scale electric power transmission networks that span our nation are occasionally subject to cascades of outages that lead to widespread blackouts. The larger blackouts are rare, but have high impact and are a substantial risk to the infrastructure of our society. The cascades of outages are complicated combinations of different phenomena, and pose challenges to modeling, analysis, and mitigation. I will discuss probabilistic models describing the cascading that are driven by utility data. We can describe the spread of outages in number and on the network, and form influence networks that describe the statistics of how successive line outages interact. The influence networks are different than the physical network topology, and outages propagate to neighbors in the inlfuence graph (this is not generally the case in the physical network). Analysis of the influence graphs could show which transmission lines contribute most to large blackouts and suggest where mitigation of blackout risk should be directed. About the Speaker
Ian Dobson was educated at Cambridge and Cornell, worked in British industry as an operations analyst and at University of Wisconsin-Madison as a professor, and is currently Sandbulte professor of electrical engineering at Iowa State University. His interests include risk analysis, nonlinear dynamics, and complex systems applied to electric power systems. For more info and papers see iandobson.ece.iastate.edu |
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