Susceptible Critical Branch Identification Based on Vulnerability Flow Redistribution

The failure of vulnerable branches defined as critical components makes a significant impact on the power grid. The susceptible branches are often overlooked yet crucial in reality. To effectively capture the impact of the susceptible branches, a novel susceptibility model is proposed based on the vulnerability flow that comprehensively considers line outage distribution factor and locally weighted flow redistribution rule. Based on this, cascading failure chains are generated according to the vulnerability flow. Based on the susceptibility indicator, the critical branches can be ranked. As the proposed method relies mainly on simple matrix calculation, it has a very low computational complexity while powerful to identify the susceptible critical branches. The proposed method is compared with literature on the IEEE 39-bus system to show its advantages, and finally, the European grid is employed to show its application to a large network.