Power System Extreme Event Detection: The Vulnerability Frontier

In this work we apply graph theoretic tools to provide a close bound on a frontier relating the number of line outages in a grid to the power disrupted by the outages. This frontier describes the boundary of a space relating the possible severity of a disturbance in terms of power disruption, from zero to some maximum on the boundary, to the number line outages involved in the event. We present the usefulness of this analysis with a complete analysis of a 30 bus system, and present results for larger systems.