Line flow contingency selection and ranking using cascade neural network

Line flow or real-power contingency selection and ranking is performed to choose the contingencies that cause the worst overloading problems. In this paper, a cascade neural network-based approach is proposed for fast line flow contingency selection and ranking. The developed cascade neural network is a combination of a filter module and a ranking module. All the contingency cases are applied to the filter module, which is trained to classify them either in critical contingency class or in non-critical contingency class using a modified BP algorithm. The screened critical contingencies are passed to the ranking module (four-layered feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN)) for their further ranking. Effectiveness of the proposed ANN-based method is demonstrated by applying it for contingency screening and ranking at different loading conditions for IEEE 14-bus system. Once trained, the cascade neural network gives fast and accurate screening and ranking for unknown patterns and is found to be suitable for on-line applications at energy management centre.