Reconstruction of cascading failures in dynamical models of power grids

Abstract

In this article, we propose a method to reconstruct the active links of a power network described by a second-order Kuramoto model and subject to dynamically induced cascading failures. Starting from the assumption (realistic for power grids) that the structure of the network is known, our method reconstructs the active links from the evolution of the relevant dynamical quantities of the nodes of the system, that is, the node phases and angular velocities. We find that, to reconstruct the temporal sequence of the faults, it is crucial to use time series with a small number of samples, as the observation window should be smaller than the temporal distance between subsequent events. This requirement is in contrast with the need of using larger sets of data in the presence of noise, such that the number of samples to feed in the algorithm has to be selected as a trade-off between the prediction error and temporal resolution of the active link reconstruction.