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

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.