Risk-aware vulnerability analysis of electric grids from attacker's perspective

Abstract

Electric grid is one of the largest interconnected networks on the earth, and is vital to the operation of modern society. Within recent decades, the occurrence of several large scale power blackouts raised many concerns from different aspects. For example, the most recent India power blackout in July 2012 affected 620 Million people. Investigating the vulnerability of electric grids becomes increasingly important and urgent. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of electric grids from attacker's point of view. First, the extended model based on DC power flow analysis is adopted to simulate cascading failures in electric grids; then a novel metric, called the risk graph, is proposed to reflect the hidden relationship among substations in terms of vulnerability; finally a practical multiple-node attack strategy is developed and proved to be stronger than the traditional load based approach on IEEE 57 and 118 bus systems. This work provided a new point of view toward understanding cascading failures in electric systems.