Fast minimal cutset evaluation in cyclic undirected graphs for power transmission systems

The evaluation of network reliability is an important topic in the planning, design, and operation of power systems. The aim of this publication is to investigate and tune up the speed of calculating 2-terminal minimal cutsets (MC). Two fast and well known algorithms are compared with a new developed MC algorithm concerning the speed of computation. The new designed algorithm is based on a novel graph reduction method, and on an adapted recursive merge method. Eleven benchmark-networks are used to analyze all three MC algorithms. Experimental results show that the new developed MC algorithm has a linear dependency between the computation time and the graph density of a network for a fixed number of nodes. Furthermore it is shown that the proposed algorithm is faster than the minimal path based algorithms and the currently best available MC algorithm for 2-terminal reliability in complex power transmission networks. A representative 57 node power transmission network demonstrates that the new proposed algorithm reduces the computation time for all relevant MC by 96.2 %.