A component-based approach for modeling failure propagations in power systems

Abstract

Resiliency and reliability is of paramount impor- tance for energy cyber physical systems. Electrical protection systems including detection elements such as Distance Relays and actuation elements such as Breakers are designed to protect the system from abnormal operations and arrest failure propagation by rapidly isolating the faulty components. However, failure in the protection devices themselves can and do lead to major system events and fault cascades, often leading to blackouts. This paper augments our past work on Temporal Causal Diagrams (TCD), a modeling formalism designed to help reason about the failure progressions by (a) describing a way to generate the TCD model from the system specification, and (b) understand the system failure dynamics for TCD reasoners by configuring simulation models.