Ecological Uniqueness for Understanding Line Importance in Power Grids
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abstract
The identification of critical components in electric power grids is an important challenge power engineers face. Similarly, many ecologists face the challenge of identifying important species in food web networks. Drawing similarities between power grid networks and food web networks, this study utilizes proposed methods from ecology literature to identify critical components in electric power grids. The ecological methods used in this study include the Sum of the Trophic Overlap (STO) and Weighted Trophic Overlap (WTO). This thesis also studied engineering methods proposed from power engineering literature to compare with the ecological methods. These engineering methods include the Normalized Line Outage Distribution Factor (NLODF) and the Topological and Impedance Element Ranking metric (TIER), for transmission line analysis, and the Controllability Index (CI) and centrality measures of betweenness centrality (BC), degree centrality (DC), and closeness centrality (CC), for non-line grid components analysis. The aim of this study is to determine if bio-inspiration provides a feasible tool to use in power grid analysis. The results show that when analyzing transmission lines, NLODF is the most accurate method. The ecological methods are often not as accurate as NLODF, but they are comparable in some cases to NLODF and TIER. Additionally, the calculations for the ecological methods are faster than the engineering methods in small cases but become slower in larger grids, suggesting more usefulness in small grids such as microgrids. Studying non-line components, buses and generators, STO and WTO are very comparable to the engineering methods studied. However, their calculations are slower, again suggesting more usefulness in smaller grid sizes. While slower than engineering methods, STO and WTO having comparable accuracy to engineering methods in many cases suggests that ecological methods may be useful for power grid analysis. This research suggests that ecological approaches to network analysis may be useful tools in power grid analysis and provides a starting point for future research utilizing ecological methods in power grid analysis. Other ecological methods exist that may be more computationally efficient than STO and WTO while maintaining similar or higher accuracy, so future research into these methods may provide useful results.
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2021 IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference (TPEC)
