Andrey Bernstein, a visiting Ph.D. student from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, received a Best Poster Award in the yearly program review of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

The poster entitled “Power Grid Vulnerability to Geographically Correlated Failures – Numerical Evaluation” outlines research results obtained by Andrey Bernstein, Daniel Bienstock, David Hay, Meric Uzunoglu, and Gil Zussman.

In particular, it focuses on line outages in the transmission system of the power grid, and specifically those caused by a natural disaster or a large scale physical attack. In the transmission system, an outage of a line may lead to overload on other lines, thereby eventually leading to their outage. While such cascading failures have been studied before, our focus is on cascading failures that follow an outage of several lines in the same geographical area. We provide an analytical model of such failures, show how to identify the most vulnerable locations in the grid and perform extensive numerical experiments with real grid data to investigate the various effects of geographically correlated outages and the resulting cascades.

For more details see the following page.