ETH Zurich - Department of Mathematics - Institute for Operations Research Master Thesis - Network reliability problems with applications in electricity networks

Reliable electricity supply is a fundamental need in industrialized countries. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to keep electric power systems in a secure state, even in case of disturbances. For this reason, electric power systems have been designed with redundancies and are able to guarantee a reliable electricity supply most of the time. However, large blackouts still occur all over the world and cause great economic damage to the affected regions. The goal of our work is to develop repair strategies that try to minimize the risk of blackouts due to cascading failures. Given a power transmission system which suffers from several line failures, we try to determine the lines that should be repaired first. We develop a realistic blackout model in order to understand the dynamics of blackouts. Based on the insights from the blackout model, we define several abstract repair problems. These problems not only lead to a concrete repair strategy for electric power systems, but are also of theoretical interest on their own. We apply the derived strategy to our blackout model and conclude that it provides a good starting point for the development of further repair strategies.