Splitting Method for Speedy Simulation of Cascading Blackouts

Simulation of cascading blackouts poses many challenges, including fast simulation of long series of rare interactions in large grid models. The splitting method advances the simulation by stages, resampling from each stage to advance to the next stage. We apply the splitting method to the simulation of cascading blackouts to efficiently determine the probability distribution of blackout size. Testing on a blackout simulation shows that splitting can quickly compute large blackouts inaccessible to other methods.