Power system blackout model embedded with AC power flow and time-varying operational states

This paper presents a novel simulation framework consisting of three interactive modules for power system analysis to reveal the quantified numerical nature of cascading failure and blackout. Rather than directly implementing DC power flow based two-layer OPA methodology, we model cascading failure and blackout using AC power flow calculation within hourly time-varying scenarios to consider voltage regulation and more realistic operational status. Moreover, three interactive modules, cascade trigger layer, operational status layer, and infrastructure upgrade layer are designed to represent cascading failure evolution, load stress variation and systemic upgrade respectively, which highlight the closely related factors impacting blackout occurrence among operation, scheduling and expansion perspective. Therefore, the proposed model is able to simulate catastrophic blackout in a more detailed way. The real power system case studies including global criticality and elemental vulnerability analysis are performed in order to verify and demonstrate the proposed model.