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Cascading Effects of Targeted Attacks on the Power Grid

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Complex Networks and Their Applications VII (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2018)

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 812))

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Abstract

We study the resilience of real world power grids to targeted adversarial attacks. Prior blackouts have shown that failures in the power grid can cascade, starting from a single failure, leading to a large number of failed nodes. In this paper, we study the problem of identifying a set of k critical nodes, whose failure/attack leads to the maximum number of tripped nodes. There has been a lot of work on this problem, but it has been mainly restricted to simple networks and failure models with either steady state analysis or DC power flow. In this paper, we perform AC power flow based transient analysis on a detailed power grid model. We find that a simple greedy approach yields node sets with higher criticality than a degree based approach, which has been suggested in many prior works. Furthermore, we observe that the cascades exhibit a non-monotonic behavior as a function of k.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their constructive comments. We also thank members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory at Virginia Tech and Professor Arun Phadke and late Professor James Thorp for their collaboration and their insightful suggestions on topics related to the paper. This work has been partially supported by DTRA CNIMS (Contract HDTRA1-11-D-0016-0001), NSF DIBBS Grant ACI-1443054, NSF BIG DATA Grant IIS-1633028, NSF EAGER Grant CMMI-1745207 and DOE Grant DE-EE0007660.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Rounak Meyur & Virgilio Centeno

  2. Biocomplexity Institute and Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Anil Vullikanti & Madhav V. Marathe

  3. School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Anamitra Pal

  4. Eaton Power Center, Omaha, Nebraska, USA

    Mina Youssef

Authors
  1. Rounak Meyur
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  2. Anil Vullikanti
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  3. Madhav V. Marathe
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  4. Anamitra Pal
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  5. Mina Youssef
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  6. Virgilio Centeno
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rounak Meyur .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, UK

    Luca Maria Aiello

  2. IUT Lumière, University of Lyon, Bron Cedex, France

    Chantal Cherifi

  3. LE2I UMR CNRS 6306 9, University of Burgundy, Dijon Cedex, France

    Hocine Cherifi

  4. Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Renaud Lambiotte

  5. Department of Computer Science and Technology, The Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Pietro Lió

  6. Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Luis M. Rocha

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© 2019 This is a U.S. government work and not under copyright protection in the U.S.; foreign copyright protection may apply

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Meyur, R., Vullikanti, A., Marathe, M.V., Pal, A., Youssef, M., Centeno, V. (2019). Cascading Effects of Targeted Attacks on the Power Grid. In: Aiello, L., Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Lambiotte, R., Lió, P., Rocha, L. (eds) Complex Networks and Their Applications VII. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2018. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 812. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05411-3_13

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