A policy switching approach to consolidating load shedding and islanding protection schemes

In recent years there have been many improvements in the reliability of critical infrastructure systems. Despite these improvements, the power systems industry has seen relatively small advances in this regard. For instance, power quality deficiencies, a high number of localized contingencies, and large cascading outages are still too widespread. Though progress has been made in improving generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure, remedial action schemes (RAS) remain non-standardized and are often not uniformly implemented across different utilities, independent system operators (ISOs), and regional transmission organizations (RTOs). Traditionally, load shedding and islanding have been successful protection measures in restraining propagation of contingencies and large cascading outages. This paper proposes a novel, algorithmic approach to selecting RAS policies to optimize the operation of the power network during and after a contingency. Specifically, we use policy-switching to consolidate traditional load shedding and islanding schemes. In order to model and simulate the functionality of the proposed power systems protection algorithm, we conduct Monte-Carlo, time-domain simulations using Siemens PSS/E. The algorithm is tested via experiments on the IEEE-39 topology to demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves optimal power system performance during emergency situations, given a specific set of RAS policies.