Power Systems Security Evaluation Using Petri Nets

Misoperation and hidden failures of protections in electric power systems have been recognized as a contributing factor to power system cascading outages and catastrophic events. For that reason, it is important to develop new tools to study the sequence of the operation of protections given a contingency in the system. This paper proposes a methodology for modeling the operating sequences of protections in the IEEE 493 system and a meshed transmission system using generalized stochastic petri nets (GSPNs), contemplating main and back-up protections, and specially how they interact.

I. Introduction

Energy supply is vitally important for daily life. Nowadays, it is required high levels of security, quality, reliability and availability (SQRA) in the Electrical Industrial Systems (EIS), because EIS are one of the most critical infrastructures of many industries that use sensible electronic loads or major processes based on electricity supply. For this reason, there is an increased interest for developing tools that allow the security evaluation of the EIS and, at the same time, include power quality and reliability criteria for this evaluation [1], [2].