  In order to mitigate cascading failure blackout risks in power systems, the
critical components whose failures lead to high blackout risks should be
identified. In this paper, such critical components are identified by the
state-failure network (SF-network) formed by cascading failure chain and loss
data, which can be gathered from either utilities or simulations. The failures
along the chains are recombined in the SF-network, where each failure is
allocated a value that can reveal the blackout risks after their occurrences.
Thus, critical failures can be identified in the SF-network where the failures
raise up blackout risks, and thus the critical components can be found based on
their critical failure risks. The simulation results validate the effectiveness
of the proposed method.
