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(a), that identifies the most vulnerable group of a links in a network. Since the computation of the new importance measure, D(a), 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(a) can be useful for an initial screening of the critical elements of the network.
Received on March 3, 2009, finally revised on July 15, 2009
References: 21