We consider the problem of performing N − k security analyses in large scale power systems. In such a context, the number of potentially dangerous N − k contingencies may become rapidly very large when k grows, and so running a security analysis for each one of them is often intractable. We assume in this paper that the number of dangerous N − k contingencies is very small with respect to the number of non-dangerous ones. Under this assumption, we suggest to use importance sampling techniques for identifying rare events in combinatorial search spaces. With such techniques, it is possible to identify dangerous contingencies by running security analyses for only a small number of events. A procedure relying on these techniques is proposed in this work for steady-state security analyses. This procedure has been evaluated on the IEEE 118 bus test system. The results show that it is indeed able to efficiently identify among a large set of contingencies some of the rare ones which are dangerous.

Abstract-This paper presents an approach for assessing, in operation planning studies, the security of a large-scale power system by decomposing it into elementary subproblems, each one corresponding to a structural weak-point of the system. We suppose that the structural weak-points are known a priori by the system operators, and are each one described by a set of constraints that are localized in some relatively small area of the system. The security analysis with respect to a given weakpoint thus reduces to the identification of the combinations of power system configurations and disturbances that could lead to the violation of some of its constraints. We propose an iterative rare-event simulation approach for identifying such combinations among the very large set of possible ones. The procedure is illustrated on a simplified version of this problem applied to the Belgian transmission system.