An Extended Metric for the Analysis of Power-Network Vulnerability: the Line Electrical Centrality

Power networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attacks. Whilst power-network design usually considers the protection of the system against network-component failure, it does not consider the protection against deliberated attacks. The inclusion of deliberated-attack analyses with traditional power-system methods may results in computational-intensive models. However, the introduction of complex-network methods in the analysis of power systems will support vulnerability studies by reducing their computational burden. Extended topological metrics, which endows topological metrics with electrical considerations, have resulted to give satisfactory results with lower computational requirements. This paper proposes a new extended metric to rank lines according to the impact that line failures have on power networks. The proposed metric is based on the idea of betweenness centrality and it considers parameters related to demand, generation and transmission lines. This paper confirms the accuracy of the proposed metric with two test cases.