The Dynamics of Blackouts in Power Transmission Systems and other Infrastructure Systems

• Complex interconnected systems make up much of the infrastructure of the modern world
  • Power transmission grids
  • Transportation systems
  • Communications systems
• These complex systems often have certain characteristics in common
  • The possibility of large cascading failures (Blackouts, traffic jams, communication/internet failures, etc)
  • A relationship between these events (a correlation) that persists on even fairly long time scales
  • A distribution of events sizes that falls off as a power law of the size rather then exponentially
  • A surprising insensitivity to the details of the individual elements in the network or system
  • Competition between forces acting on different time scale (for example the relatively slow growth in power demand vs the very fast cascade time scale) organizes the system to live at a near critical point which allows failures of all sizes to occur
  • Failures are inevitable...all we can do is change their probability
  • Trying to improve the reliability of individual system components can sometime have the counter intuitive effect of causing more large events

  Our approach to studying blackouts and cascading failures in other complex infrastructure systems is to look at the overall system dynamics instead of concentrating on the small details of the system. Note: this is not to say understanding the details is not important, we believe both the global, long time system and the small short time details must be investigated.

A general comment about the blackout of 2003

A good IEEE spectrum cover article on the blackout entitled "The Unruly Power Grid"

Some Recent Papers and Presentations

Evidence for self-organized criticality in a time series of electric power system blackouts
B. A. Carreras, D. E. Newman, I. Dobson, A. B. Poole, , IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, Volume: 51 , Issue 9 , Sept. 2004, Pages: 1733 - 1740

The next 12 papers discuss a series of dynamic and probabilistic power transmission network models which capture some or much of the dynamics the blackout sequences:

An initial model for complex dynamics in electric power system blackouts
I. Dobson, B. A. Carreras, V. Lynch, D. E. Newman, Thirty-fourth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, January 2001

Modeling blackout dynamics in power transmission networks with simple structure
B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, M. L. Sachtjen, I. Dobson, D. E. Newman, Thirty-fourth Hawaii International Conference on, System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, January 2001

Dynamics, criticality and self-organization in a model for blackouts in power transmission systems
B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, I. Dobson, D. E. Newman, Thirty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2002

Critical points and transitions in an electric power transmission model for cascading failure blackouts
B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, I. Dobson, D. E. Newman, Chaos, vol 12, no 4, December 2002, pp 985-994, Copyright AIP 2002

A probabilistic loading-dependent model of cascading failure and possible implications for blackouts
I. Dobson, B. A. Carreras, D. E. Newman, Thirty-sixth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2003

Complex Dynamics of Blackouts in Power Transmission Systems
B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, I. Dobson, D. E. Newman, submitted to Chaos, Aug. 2003 (Preprint) (accepted June 2004) to appear in Chaos

A branching process approximation to cascading load-dependent system failure
I. Dobson, B. A. Carreras, D. E. Newman, Thirty-seventh Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2004

A loading-dependent model of probabilistic cascading failure
I. Dobson, B. A. Carreras, D. E. Newman, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol 19, no 1, Jan 2005, pp. 15-32

Estimating failure propagation in models of cascading blackouts
I. Dobson, B.A. Carreras, V.E. Lynch, B. Nkei, D.E. Newman, Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, vol 19, no 4, October 2005, pp 475-488 (journal publication of conference paper in Probability Methods Applied to Power Systems, Ames Iowa, 2004)

An estimator of propagation of cascading failure
I. Dobson, K.R. Wierzbicki, B.A. Carreras, V.E. Lynch, D.E. Newman Thirty-ninth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Kauai, Hawaii, January 2006

An approach to statistical estimation of cascading failure propagation in blackouts
K.R. Wierzbicki, I. Dobson CRIS, Third International Conference on Critical Infrastructures, Alexandria VA, Sept. 2006

Where is the edge for cascading failure?: challenges and opportunities for quantifying blackout risk
I. Dobson IEEE Power Engineering Society General Meeting, Tampa FL USA, June 2007

The next 4 papers look at the effect of mitigation techniques on these complex systems models and finds that the result is often counter intuitive:

Blackout mitigation assessment in power transmission systems
B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, D. E. Newman, I. Dobson, Thirty-sixth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2003

Cascading dynamics and mitigation assessment in power system disturbances via a hidden failure model
J. Chen, J.S. Thorp, I. Dobson International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems, vol 27, no 4, May 2005, pp. 318-326 doi:10.1016/j.ijepes.2004.12.003

The impact of various upgrade strategies on the long-term dynamics and robustness of the transmission grid
D.E. Newman, B.A. Carreras, V.E. Lynch, I. Dobson Electricity Transmission in Deregulated Markets, conference at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, December 2004

Evaluating the effect of upgrade, control and development strategies on robustness and failure risk of the power transmission grid
D.E. Newman, B.A. Carreras, V.E. Lynch, I. Dobson Forty-first Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2008

The next 3 papers look at the effect of interacting complex systems both for the point of view in interacting infrastructures and modeling human response to risk:

Risk Assessment in Complex Interacting Infrastructure Systems
D. E. Newman, Bertrand Nkei , B. A. Carreras , I. Dobson, V. E. Lynch, Paul Gradney, Thirty-eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2005

Understanding the Effect of Risk Aversion on Risk
U. S. Bhatt, D. E. Newman, B. A. Carreras , I. Dobson Thirty-eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2005

A simple model for the reliability of an infrastructure system controlled by agents
B.A. Carreras, D.E. Newman, I. Dobson, M. Zeidenberg Forty-second Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, January 2009

Communications systems

The paper in this section looks at a complex systems type model of a internet type communications model and compares it to real data, finding some remarkable similarities:

Growth and Propagation of Disturbances in a Communication Network Model, D. E. Newman, B. A. Carreras, Nathaniel D. Sizemore, and V. E. Lynch, accepted for publication, 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii, Hawaii, Jan. 2002.

 

Some general Complex Systems Publications

Avalanche structure of a running sandpile, B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch, D. E. Newman and R. Sánchez, Physical Review E, 66, 011302 (2002)

A Transition in the Dynamics of a Diffusive Running Sandpile, D. E. Newman, R. Sanchez and B. A. Carreras, Phys Rev Lett., 204304, (2002)

Quiet-time statistics: a tool to probe SOC dynamics from within the strong overlapping regime, R. Sánchez, D. E. Newman, W. Ferenbaugh, B. A. Carreras, V. E. Lynch and B. Ph. van Milligen, Physical Review E, 66, 036124 (2002)

Waiting-time statistics of self-organized critical systems, R. Sanchez, D. E. Newman, and B. A. Carreras,Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 068302 (2002)

This work is the result of a very productive (and real) collaboration between David Newman at Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks, Ben Carreras (and coworkers) at BACV (formerly at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Ian Dobson at Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison and has been supported by NSF and DOE through the CERTS program

Links to collaborators sites:

Ian Dobson's web page at Univ. of Wisconsin- Madison

Ben Carreras's web page at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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This was last changed on 26 January, 2009

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