In the off-line study environment (planning or operational planning) the above approach enables security experts to gain valuable insight into the physical behavior of their system, by allowing them to identify the predominant factors and conditions which determine contingency severities. This is, by itself, a very important outcome of the method. On the other hand, once the synthetic models have been extracted and validated they may be used for security analysis and control, in particular in the on-line operation context as is further discussed below.