Analysis and Mitigation of Cascading Failure Spatial Propagation in Real Utility Outage Data

In this paper, the spatial propagation of cascading failures is studied for real utility outage data from Bonneville Power Administration (BPA). The spatial propagation features based on geographical distances are revealed by the proposed analysis method. Furthermore, a critical component identification method is proposed based on a new metric that combines the information of the expected number of outages and that of the spatial distance. A cascading failure mitigation strategy is further proposed based on the upgrading of the identified critical components. The effectiveness of the proposed mitigation strategy in terms of suppressing spatial propagation is validated on the 14-year real utility outage data from BPA.