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Modular Control of Discrete Event System for Modeling and Mitigating Power System Cascading Failures

Wasseem Al-Rousan, Caisheng Wang, Feng Lin

TL;DR

The work tackles power-system cascading failures by framing the grid as a DES and extending supervisory control to include forcible events and online lookahead. It develops a modular, decentralized control framework that reduces state explosion and enhances robustness, formalizing F-controllability and the supremal sublanguage $K^\uparrow$ to guide controller design. The approach is implemented in MATLAB with libFAUDES/Matpower integrations and validated on IEEE 30-, 118-, and 300-bus systems, showing effective prevention of cascades and significant reductions in blackout severity compared with uncontrolled scenarios, though it may incur higher MW loss than a centralized planner. Overall, the modular DES controller provides scalable, reliable protection against cascading failures, offering practical benefits for large-scale grids where centralized control is impractical or fragile.

Abstract

Cascading failures in power systems caused by sequential tripping of components are a serious concern as they can lead to complete or partial shutdowns, disrupting vital services and causing damage and inconvenience. In prior work, we developed a new approach for identifying and preventing cascading failures in power systems. The approach uses supervisory control technique of discrete event systems (DES) by incorporating both on-line lookahead control and forcible events. In this paper, we use modular supervisory control of DES to reduce computation complexity and increase the robustness and reliability of control. Modular supervisory control allows us to predict and mitigate cascading failures in power systems more effectively. We implemented the proposed control technique on a simulation platform developed in MATLAB and applied the proposed DES controller. The calculations of modular supervisory control of DES are performed using an external tool and imported into the MATLAB platform. We conduct simulation studies for the IEEE 30-bus, 118-bus and 300-bus systems, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Modular Control of Discrete Event System for Modeling and Mitigating Power System Cascading Failures

TL;DR

The work tackles power-system cascading failures by framing the grid as a DES and extending supervisory control to include forcible events and online lookahead. It develops a modular, decentralized control framework that reduces state explosion and enhances robustness, formalizing F-controllability and the supremal sublanguage to guide controller design. The approach is implemented in MATLAB with libFAUDES/Matpower integrations and validated on IEEE 30-, 118-, and 300-bus systems, showing effective prevention of cascades and significant reductions in blackout severity compared with uncontrolled scenarios, though it may incur higher MW loss than a centralized planner. Overall, the modular DES controller provides scalable, reliable protection against cascading failures, offering practical benefits for large-scale grids where centralized control is impractical or fragile.

Abstract

Cascading failures in power systems caused by sequential tripping of components are a serious concern as they can lead to complete or partial shutdowns, disrupting vital services and causing damage and inconvenience. In prior work, we developed a new approach for identifying and preventing cascading failures in power systems. The approach uses supervisory control technique of discrete event systems (DES) by incorporating both on-line lookahead control and forcible events. In this paper, we use modular supervisory control of DES to reduce computation complexity and increase the robustness and reliability of control. Modular supervisory control allows us to predict and mitigate cascading failures in power systems more effectively. We implemented the proposed control technique on a simulation platform developed in MATLAB and applied the proposed DES controller. The calculations of modular supervisory control of DES are performed using an external tool and imported into the MATLAB platform. We conduct simulation studies for the IEEE 30-bus, 118-bus and 300-bus systems, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 10 sections, 3 theorems, 54 equations, 20 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Discrete Event System Model of Power Systems
  3. Supervisory Control with Forcible Events
  4. Modular supervisory control with forcible events
  5. Implementation and Simulations
  6. Sub-system model
  7. Specification
  8. Controller synthesis
  9. Simulation results
  10. Conclusion

Key Result

Theorem 1

The language generated by the closed-loop system, $L(\wedge \mathcal{S}_j/\mathcal{P})$ is given by

Figures (20)

  • Figure 1: Modular supervisory control
  • Figure 2: Subset diagrams of centralized control (a) and modular control (b).
  • Figure 3: Automata models for main components.
  • Figure 4: Simple power system with 2 nodes.
  • Figure 5: The automaton $\mathcal{P} ^{1,1}$ for node 1 . a- Automaton models of individual components connected to node 1. b- Parallel composition of all the components in (a).
  • ...and 15 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (4)

  • Remark 1
  • Theorem 1
  • Theorem 2
  • Theorem 3