Adaptive network reliability analysis: Methodology and applications to power grid

Flow network models can capture the underlying physics and operational constraints of many networked systems including the power grid and transportation and water networks. However, analyzing systems’ reliability using computationally expensive flow-based models faces substantial challenges, especially for rare events. Existing actively trained meta-models, which present a new promising direction in reliability analysis, are not applicable to networks due to the inability of these methods to handle high-dimensional problems as well as discrete or mixed variable inputs. This study presents the first Adaptive surrogate-based Network Reliability (ANR) analysis through integration of Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) and Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). An active learning method is developed that identifies the most valuable training samples based on the credible intervals derived by BART over the space of predictor variables as well as the proximity of the points to the estimated limit state. Benchmark power grids including IEEE 30, 57, 118, and 300-bus systems and their power flow models for cascading failure analysis are considered to investigate ANR-BART, MCS, subset simulation, and passively-trained optimal BART and deep neural networks. Results indicate that ANR-BART is robust and yields accurate estimates of network failure probability, while significantly reducing the computational cost of reliability analysis.