Evaluation and Visualization of Multi-level Contingencies in Power Systems

Contingency analysis is a critical technique for evaluating the operational capability of power systems and characterizing their vulnerability to component faults. The traditional requirement for reliable operations has been an n-1 security constraint --- an electrical network should be resilient to contingencies involving any one element.Contingency analysis is critical to evaluating the operational capacity of power systems and characterizing their vulnerability to component faults. As we look to increase the resilience of networks to element failure, the instance of multiple contingencies is of growing concern for planners and operators in identifying weak points in the system. Multi-element contingencies introduce new challenges for how to reliably and consistently measure the severity of a fault, how to perform contingency analysis on an expanding range of contingency scenarios in a timely manner, and how to interpret the increasingly hierarchical data obtained by contingency analysis. This research explores techniques that can be used to generate, summarize and display the results of multi-element contingency analyses in power systems, including high-performance computational methods for evaluating contingencies and new visualization techniques that leverage visual summarization and live interaction to extract valuable insights from the resulting data.M.A.S