A network congestion management approach considering the risk of cascading failures

This paper proposes a novel congestion management scheme that achieves the best trade-off among operation costs, acceptable levels of congestion and the risk of cascading failures. The proposed scheme manages network congestion at acceptable levels while minimizing the operating costs and risks of cascading failures. The scheme works in two steps: generation rescheduling and load shedding. In the first step, it attempts to reduce congestion through an optimal (lowest fuel cost) rescheduling of generation. If the revised generation schedule fails to reduce congestion, it tries the second step, namely, optimal (minimizing the impact on revenues and customers) load shedding. The scheme employs Particle Swarm Optimization technique to optimize the individual steps and uses Fuzzy Satisfying technique to choose the best solution from the set of Pareto optimal solutions. The proposed system has been evaluated on IEEE 30 and 118 bus test systems. The results of this evaluation are included as well.