Assessing security assessment

The authors discuss aspect-operator-test graphs, a method for representing and evaluating engineering tasks, and apply them to power system security assessment. The result indicates where research is most needed. An analysis of existing practices for short-term security assessment shows that their greatest weakness is their complete lack of clearly articulated, readily applicable, quality assurance tests. Second in the list of deficiencies is the variation of aspect population densities over the security assessment task. Last on the list are the algorithmic screening procedures used by many short-term assessment schemes to produce a worst-case list of contingencies.<>