Power grid failures often cascade through complex interdependencies between protection devices and system components. This work is innovative in applying distributed online diagnostic reasoning with temporal causal models to enable systematic root-cause analysis of cascading blackouts, accounting for timing delays and interdependencies in protection device operations.
This poster presents a distributed reasoning approach for diagnosing cascading outages in cyber-physical energy systems. The work uses temporal causal diagrams to model failure propagation through power grid protection equipment, enabling diagnosis of complex failure scenarios where protection elements interact across the system.
The approach successfully diagnoses IEEE 14-Bus test cases showing how protection element misconfiguration leads to cascading failures. Temporal causal reasoning correctly identifies failure sequences including protection equipment misoperations and resulting blackout scenarios. The method demonstrates feasibility of systematic diagnosis for complex power system failure modes.
@inproceedings{Chhokra2016,
author = {Chhokra, Ajay and Dubey, Abhishek and Mahadevan, Nagabhushan and Karsai, Gabor},
booktitle = {7th {ACM/IEEE} International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, {ICCPS} 2016, Vienna, Austria, April 11-14, 2016},
title = {Poster Abstract: Distributed Reasoning for Diagnosing Cascading Outages in Cyber Physical Energy Systems},
year = {2016},
pages = {33:1},
abstract = {The power grid incorporates a number of protection elements such as distance relays that detect faults and prevent the propagation of failure effects from influencing the rest of system. However, the decision of these protection elements is only influenced by local information in the form of bus voltage/current (V-I) samples. Due to lack of system wide perspective, erroneous settings, and latent failure modes, protection devices often mis-operate and cause cascading effects that ultimately lead to blackouts. Blackouts around the world have been triggered or worsened by circuit breakers tripping, including the blackout of 2003 in North America, where the secondary/ remote protection relays incorrectly opened the breaker. Tools that aid the operators in finding the root cause of the problem on-line are required. However, high system complexity and the interdependencies between the cyber and physical elements of the system and the mis-operation of protection devices make the failure diagnosis a challenging problem.},
bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/iccps/ChhokraDMK16},
category = {poster},
contribution = {lead},
doi = {10.1109/ICCPS.2016.7479113},
file = {:Chhokra2016-Poster_Abstract_Distributed_Reasoning_for_Diagnosing_Cascading_Outages_in_Cyber_Physical_Energy_Systems.pdf:PDF},
keywords = {power systems, failure diagnosis, cascading outages, distributed reasoning, temporal causal models, protection systems},
project = {cps-reliability},
tag = {platform},
timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:57 +0200},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCPS.2016.7479113}
}