A novel application of parallel betweenness centrality to power grid contingency analysis

In Energy Management Systems, contingency analysis is commonly performed for identifying and mitigating potentially harmful power grid component failures. The exponentially increasing combinatorial number of failure modes imposes a significant computational burden for massive contingency analysis. It is critical to select a limited set of high-impact contingency cases within the constraint of computing power and time requirements to make it possible for real-time power system vulnerability assessment. In this paper, we present a novel application of parallel betweenness centrality to power grid contingency selection. We cross-validate the proposed method using the model and data of the western US power grid, and implement it on a Cray XMT system - a massively multithreaded architecture - leveraging its advantages for parallel execution of irregular algorithms, such as graph analysis. We achieve a speedup of 55 times (on 64 processors) compared against the single-processor version of the same code running on the Cray XMT. We also compare an OpenMP-based version of the same code running on an HP Superdome shared-memory machine. The performance of the Cray XMT code shows better scalability and resource utilization, and shorter execution time for large-scale power grids. This proposed approach has been evaluated in PNNL´s Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center (EIOC). It is expected to provide a quick and efficient solution to massive contingency selection problems to help power grid operators to identify and mitigate potential widespread cascading power grid failures in real time.