LAUSR

We describe a model which may be useful for studying blackouts in power networks. The model is a combination of the admittance model of the network and the probabilistic model of failures of its components. To compute the total probability of a power outage possible failure events are considered and in each case the possibility of a cascading failure is studied. In each step, faulty components are removed, graph representation of the network is used to detect connected components in the graph, and then, network equations are solved separately in each component. We discuss the problem whether multi-fault events have to be considered when computing the total blackout probability. We show how this model can be used to develop suggestions for improving power network designs. Example power networks are considered to show the usefulness of this approach.