International Journal of Performability Engineering 

Volume 6, Number 1, January 2010

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Paper 4 - pp. 53 - 61 A Flow Importance Measure with Application to an Italian Transmission Power System CLAUDIO M. ROCCO S1, JOSÉ EMMANUEL RAMIREZ-MARQUEZ2, DANIEL E. SALAZAR A3 and ENRICO ZIO4 1 Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, Venezuela 2 Stevens Institute of Technology, Castle Point on Hudson, Hoboken, NJ, 07030, U.S.A. 3 Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint Etienne, France 4 Politecnico di Milano, Italy Abstract: Potential catastrophic events have been historically assessed through the techniques of power system security analysis. A correct assessment must consider not only events associated with "credible outages" but also the possibility of attacks and/or "rare" events. This paper combines concepts of reliability engineering and operations research to develop a new importance measure, D(α), that identifies the most vulnerable group of α links in a network. Since the computation of the new importance measure, D(α), becomes computationally prohibitive for large systems,  an approximation technique is provided based on the optimization of a multi-objective deterministic network interdiction problem. The efficiency of the algorithm is then illustrated by analyzing the Italian high-voltage electrical transmission network. In summary, D(α) can be useful for an initial screening of the critical elements of the network.         Click "Add to Cart" to purchase the full article