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Electrical distribution needs to protect society by providing reliable power, even under changing conditions. The current approach to design electrical distribution grids often focuses on steady state design requirements or response to a subset of potential faults. Even small and gradual changes in loading, however, can cause voltage transients and lead to major blackouts due to voltage collapse. As electric demand increases and infrastructure operates near its design limits, these events are likely to become more common. While designers can examine slowly changing load transients, this occurs after creating a model of the proposed grid, which can be costly. Thus, this research examines the following gap: A cost-effective approach is needed early in the electrical distribution design process to screen candidate architectures for their expected response to slowly changing operating conditions. 

There is an opportunity to examine unexpected voltage collapse through the lens of ecosystem critical transitions. Critical transitions occur when an ecosystem shifts suddenly from one stable configuration (e.g. forest) to another (e.g. grassland) due to slowly changing environmental conditions (e.g. annual rainfall). The mathematical framework established to evaluate and classify critical transitions has been well studied but has not been used to design electrical distribution. The central hypothesis examined in this proposal is If we screen initial electrical distribution architectures with graph theory (Ecological Network Analysis), then the resulting designs will have improved critical transition performance over non-screened architectures. Critical transition performance has two aspects: 

1.superior ability to absorb additional loading before voltage collapse (i.e. margin to critical transition), and 

2. transition to desirable, stable secondary configurations following voltage collapse, rather than cascading throughout the system and causing a complete blackout (i.e. type of Bifurcation).

The objective of this research is to develop and validate a new approach to design-for-transient resilience that provides additional insights, is less expensive, and can be used early in the design process.