Structural Vulnerability Analysis of Electric Power Distribution Grids

TL;DR

This paper introduces a topological vulnerability metric for power distribution grids, enabling assessment of asset criticality to improve grid robustness against outages caused by weather, demand, and aging infrastructure.

Contribution

It proposes a novel topological vulnerability metric for distribution grids and demonstrates its practical application using real-world data.

Findings

The metric effectively identifies critical assets in distribution grids.

Application to real data shows the metric's usefulness in vulnerability assessment.

Highlights the importance of topological analysis for grid security.

Abstract

Power grid outages cause huge economical and societal costs. Disruptions in the power distribution grid are responsible for a significant fraction of electric power unavailability to customers. The impact of extreme weather conditions, continuously increasing demand, and the over-ageing of assets in the grid, deteriorates the safety of electric power delivery in the near future. It is this dependence on electric power that necessitates further research in the power distribution grid security assessment. Thus measures to analyze the robustness characteristics and to identify vulnerabilities as they exist in the grid are of utmost importance. This research investigates exactly those concepts- the vulnerability and robustness of power distribution grids from a topological point of view, and proposes a metric to quantify them with respect to assets in a distribution grid. Real-world data is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed metric as a tool to assess the criticality of assets in a distribution grid.