Structural Vulnerability of Power Grids to Disasters: Bounds, Adversarial Attacks and Reinforcement

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural vulnerability of power grids to natural disasters and adversarial attacks, introducing new bounds and schemes to quantify and enhance grid resilience using graph-based metrics and simulations.

Contribution

It develops improved eigenvalue-based bounds on grid vulnerability and proposes attack schemes to identify critical lines, aiding in designing better protection strategies.

Findings

New bounds on grid vulnerability improve assessment accuracy.

Adversarial attack schemes effectively identify critical transmission lines.

Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed protection strategies.

Abstract

Natural Disasters like hurricanes, floods or earthquakes can damage power grid devices and create cascading blackouts and islands. The nature of failure propagation and extent of damage is dependent on the structural features of the grid, which is different from that of random networks. This paper analyzes the structural vulnerability of real power grids to impending disasters and presents intuitive graphical metrics to quantify the extent of damage. Two improved graph eigen-value based bounds on the grid vulnerability are developed and demonstrated through simulations of failure propagation on IEEE test cases and real networks. Finally this paper studies adversarial attacks aimed at weakening the grid's structural resilience and presents two approximate schemes to determine the critical transmission lines that may be attacked to minimize grid resilience. The framework can be also be used to design protection schemes to secure the grid against such adversarial attacks. Simulations on power networks are used to compare the performance of the attack schemes in reducing grid resilience.