A New Approach for Contingency Analysis Based on Centrality Measures

The contingency analysis of power systems represents a critical part of security monitoring, required to maintain power system reliability. In general, traditional $N-1$ contingency analysis methods simulate a few outages, due to the high computational costs involved. Thus, they may fail to identify some critical contingencies that can lead to cascading failures. This paper proposes a new approach to $N-1$ contingency analysis of electric transmission systems, based on network centrality measures. The proposed method evaluates all possible transmission line outages in a very short computational time, and it requires only topological information. Results are shown for two electric power systems: ITAIPU 11 bus and IEEE 39 bus. Comparisons between the results obtained by the proposed method and traditional ones show the accuracy of the proposed method to identify critical buses and transmission lines, in local and global context, even in absence of electrical information. The proposed method is interesting as a direct and fast tool applied to the pre-analysis process, since topological network behavior is verified. Thus, pre-analysis provides a prior response to the system operator of the points by which the electrical power system analysis should begin, in order to ensure safe operational state of the system.