Vulnerability Analysis of the Electric Power Grid

Ali Pinar
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Robust operation of a power grid requires anticipating likely events
that can lead to costly blackouts. The Northeast blackout of August
2003 for instance, started with only three broken power
lines. Detecting vulnerabilities of the power system requires solving
combinatorial optimization problems constrained by nonlinear power
flow equations.  In this talk, I will first present a mixed integer
nonlinear programming (MINLP) formulation of the vulnerability
analysis problem, and provide an analysis of the structure of an
optimal solution for this problem. I will use this analysis to
approximate the original MINLP formulation with pure combinatorial
problems, namely the network inhibition problem and the inhibiting
bisection problem.

Brief Biography:
Ali Pinar is a member of the High Performance Computing Research
Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.  His research is
on combinatorial problems arising in algorithms and applications of
scientific computing, with emphasis on parallel algorithms,
communication libraries, sparse matrix computations, electric power
systems, and data analysis.  He received his PhD. degree in computer
science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with the
option of computational science and engineering, and his B.S. and
M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey.