eng Science and Education Publishing American Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering 2328-7357 2019-07-24 7 2 38 41 10.12691/ajeee-7-2-3 AJEEE2019723 article Xiao Lyu nnulvxiao@126.com 1 Dan Lyu 1 Yuge Yang 1 School of Electrical & Automation Engineering, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China The power system is a complex nonlinear system composed of many dynamic components that interact with each other. Failure of any component in the system will have varying degrees of effects on the entire system. From the perspective of the fragility of complex systems, the brittleness factor model and brittleness correlation factor model of power systems are established in this paper, and a method to determine the brittleness chain of power network is proposed. The experimental results show that the model can realize the identification of the component failure of the potential excitation system and prevent effectively the occurrence of cascading failure, and verify the accuracy and validity of the model. http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajeee/7/2/3/ajeee-7-2-3.pdf power systems system brittleness brittle correlation factor brittleness factor