An effective approach to determine the sensitive transmission lines due to the effect of hidden failure in a protection system

Protection system hidden failure was identified as one of the main causes of cascading failure. However, in the current practice of power system analysis, protection system is assumed to be perfect and the impact of hidden failures of a protection system is neglected. This paper proposes a systematically accurate technique to evaluate the impact of protection system hidden failures to the probability of system cascading outage. Further analysis is performed by analyzing the results of the probability of a system cascading outage which will then be used to identify the initial tripping of sensitive transmission lines that could contribute to calamitous cascading outage in the system. In accordance with the results that have been obtained, it is important to decide on the accurate value of the hidden failure probability as it will have an effect on the probability of a system cascading outage. This analysis is beneficial not only for the power system operation and planning, but also to the system operator in order to determine the exact locations to improve the protection system.