As power systems become increasingly stability constrained, the need for dynamic security assessment (DSA) becomes important. However, the resources and technology required to achieve on-line DSA at reasonable cost for utility companies are not easily come by. Therefore, an offline method is needed to examine and screen all likely contingencies to determine those that may lead to instability. Some indices and techniques have been proposed to tackle this problem but are mostly for small disturbances which are not really threats when timely cleared. Some methods are based on evolutionary computation which comes with a lot of drawbacks as there is no guarantee of finding optimal solutions within a finite time and parameter tuning are mostly by...