An extended metric for the analysis of power-network vulnerability: the line electrical centrality

Abstract

Power networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attacks. Whilst power-network design usually considers the protection of the system against networkcomponent 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. Although, prior works show that pure topological metrics do not give conclusive results in vulnerability analyses, 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, the line electrical centrality, with a view to ranking 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 the IEEE 9-bus and IEEE-118-bus test systems.