Non-local impact of line outages in linear power flow model

Abstract:

Failing links can degrade the operation of supply networks such as power grids up to a complete collapse. The interplay between topology and locality of the network response to such damage is poorly understood. Here, we study the role of network topology for the spreading of  flow changes after the outage of a single line in linear flow networks with a special focus on power grids. In particular, we analyze the decay of flow changes with distance after a line outage and introduce a rerouting distance to predict this decay for real-world networks. In addition to that, we derive rigorous bounds based purely on the network topology for the non-locality of the network response to the line outage. Our results show that it is possible to forecast flow rerouting after line outage to a large extent based on purely topological measures and that these effects generally decay with distance from the failing link.

Contributors: Julius Strake, Franz Kaiser, Farnaz Basiri, Henrik Ronellenfitsch, Dirk Witthaut