Empirical framework for identification of the most harmful malicious attacks on a smart grid

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is the identification of the most harmful malicious attacks in a smart grid with basis on the removal of buses in a particular sequence. For that, we define the Electrical Most Damaging Element (EMDE) and the Iterated Centrality Measure (ICM). The EMDE is the element that leads to the largest unsatisfied load increase after removed, in the current state of the smart grid. The ICM is a meaningful scaled centrality for iterated attacks. Attack strategies such as the IEMDE (Iterated Electrical Most Damaging Element) and the Iterated Most Central Element (IMCE) are proposed as references for evaluating the impact of failure sequences by comparison. For each fault strategy approach, the vulnerability curves as well as a scalability analysis are presented. It is demonstrated that the IEMDE approximated the $$N-k-\varepsilon$$ N - k - ε algorithm, but with reduced computational expense. Furthermore, the IMCE approach provided an efficient fault profile close to the performance of the IEMDE. Although this framework is applied in this paper to failures in buses, it can similarly be applied to other elements. Future research will be focused in applying these concepts to transmission lines.

Keywords

• Vulnerability assessment
• Graph theory
• Powergrid
• Centrality measures
• Matpower