Benchmarking Quasi-Steady State Cascading Outage Analysis Methodologies

Various methodologies exist for assessing the risk of cascading outage in power systems, differing in the cascading mechanisms considered and in the way they are modeled. These methodologies can be classified in three groups: static computation (QSS methodologies), dynamic computation (dynamic methodologies), or a combination of both (hybrid methodologies). The objective of this paper is to benchmark the performance of several widely used QSS cascading outage methodologies. For that purpose, they are applied on a unique system, the RTS-96, and the results are compared. Several metrics and indicators are used for that comparison: expected demand loss, distribution of demand loss, distribution of lines outaged and critical lines. Results show common trends but also discrepancies between methodologies. It implies that there is not yet a standardized way to analyze the risk of cascading outage in power systems, and that the specific tool used by a power system engineer can impact the recommendations.