Graduation Year

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.S.E.E.

Department

Electrical Engineering

Degree Granting Department

Electrical Engineering

Major Professor

Nasir Ghani, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Zhixin Miao, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Lingling Fan, Ph.D.

Keywords

Disaster Recovery, Failure Analysis, Interdependent Systems, Network Survivability, Smart Power Grids, Telecommunication Network

Abstract

Power transmission grid infrastructures deliver electricity across large distance and are vital to the functioning of modern society. Increasingly these setups embody highly-coupled cyber-physical systems where advanced telecommunications networks are used to send status and control information to operate power transmission grid components, i.e., "smart grids". However, due to the high inter-dependency between the communication and power grid network layers, failure events can lead to further loss of control of key grid components, i.e., even if they are undamaged. In turn, such dependencies can exacerbate cascading failures and lead to larger electricity blackouts, particularly under disaster conditions. As a result, a range of studies have looked at modelling failures in interdependent smart grids. However most of these designs have not considered the use of proactive network-level survivability schemes. Indeed, these strategies can help maintain vital control connectivity during failures and potentially lead to reduced outages. Hence this thesis addresses this critical area and applies connection protection methodologies to reduce communication/control disruption in transmission grids. The performance of these schemes is then analyzed using detailed simulation for a sample IEEE transmission grid. Overall findings show a good reduction in the number of overloaded transmission lines when applying network-level recovery schemes.

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