BACKGROUND Little is known about how power outages affect health. We investigated mortality effects of the largest US blackout to date, 14-15 August 2003 in New York, NY. METHODS We estimated mortality risk in New York, NY, using a generalized linear model with data from 1987-2005. We incorporated possible confounders, including weather and long-term and seasonal mortality trends. RESULTS D...

Free space optical communication through the atmosphere has the potential to provide secure, low-cost, rapidly deployable, dynamic, data transmission at very high rates. However, the deleterious effects of turbulence can severely limit the utility of such a system, causing outages of up to 100 ms. For this thesis, we investigate an architecture that uses multiple transmitters and multiple coher...

Underground cable power transmission and distribution system are susceptible to faults. Accurate fault location for transmission lines is of vital importance. A quick detection and analysis of faults is necessity of power retailers and distributors. This paper reviews various fault locating methods and highly computational methods proposed by research community that are currently in use. The pa...

One measure of the resilience of any dynamical system is the speed of return to equilibrium following perturbation. In electrical power distribution systems this may be approximated by the duration of unscheduled outages due to failure of the distribution system (i.e., excluding outages due to failure of the generation or transmission systems). We hypothesize that the resilience of power distri...

Cascading failures in electricity networks often result in large blackouts with severe social consequences. A cascading failure typically begins with one or more equipment outages that cause operating constraint violations. When violations persist in a network, they can trigger additional outages which in turn may cause further violations. This paper proposes a method for limiting the social co...

using a choice experiment survey, the marginal willingness to pay (wtp) among iranian households to avoid power outages is estimated. the results indicate that households prefer lower price of alternatives and the low duration and frequency of outages, and the factors of outage day, outage time and warning in advance of outage are important to households' preferences. moreover, the conditi...

Cyber security is becoming more and more relevant with the advent of large-scale systems made of independent and autonomous constituent systems that interoperate to achieve complex goals. To ensure security of cyberphysical systems, it is important to analyze identified threats and their possible consequences. In case of smart grids as an example of a complex system, threats can result in power...

Power grids exhibit patterns of reaction to outages similar to complex networks. Blackout sequences follow power laws, as complex systems operating near a critical point. Here, the tolerance of electric power grids to both accidental and malicious outages is analyzed in the framework of complex network theory. In particular, the quantity known as efficiency is modified by introducing a new conc...