The main objective of this thesis was to develop appropriate system protection schemes against two important causes of failure in power systems, namely, long-term voltage instability and cascade tripping of overloaded transmission lines, mainly due to overloading. To this purpose a distributed undervoltage load shedding scheme against voltage instability, and a centralized protection meant to alleviate line overload are proposed. The former, through the chosen system protection scheme characteristics, has the ability to adjust its actions to the disturbance location and severity. This behavior is achieved without resorting to a dedicated communication network. The distributed controllers do not exchange information, but are rather informed of their respective actions through voltage measurements. Neither do the controllers require a model of the system. This and the absence of communication makes the protection scheme simple and reliable. The other protection scheme, inspired of model predictive control, is aimed at bringing the currents in the overloaded lines below their limits in the time interval left by protections, while accounting for constraints on control changes. Its closed-loop nature allows to compensate for model uncertainties and measurement noise. In order to tune the proposed system protection schemes parameters and validate their performance it was preferred to detect plausible cascading event scenarios. To this purpose, an algorithm meant to identify such complex sequences has been developed. It encompasses hidden failures and the resulting system response. The tests performed on small systems as well as on a real-life one confirm not only that proposed protection schemes appropriately deal with the problems for which they were designed, but also that they cooperate satisfactorily for combined voltage and thermal problems that are beyond their individual capabilities.