Abstract
This paper reviews the most relevant works that have investigated robustness in power grids using Complex Networks (CN) concepts. In this broad field there are two different approaches. The first one is based solely on topological concepts, and uses metrics such as mean path length, clustering coefficient, efficiency and betweenness centrality, among many others. The second, hybrid approach consists of introducing (into the CN framework) some concepts from Electrical Engineering (EE) in the effort of enhancing the topological approach, and uses novel, more efficient electrical metrics such as electrical betweenness, net-ability, and others. There is however a controversy about whether these approaches are able to provide insights into all aspects of real power grids. The CN community argues that the topological approach does not aim to focus on the detailed operation, but to discover the unexpected emergence of collective behavior, while part of the EE community asserts that this leads to an excessive simplification. Beyond this open debate it seems to be no predominant structure (scale-free, small-world) in high-voltage transmission power grids, the vast majority of power grids studied so far. Most of them have in common that they are vulnerable to targeted attacks on the most connected nodes and robust to random failure. In this respect there are only a few works that propose strategies to improve robustness such as intentional islanding, restricted link addition, microgrids and Energies 2015, 8 9212 smart grids, for which novel studies suggest that small-world networks seem to be the best topology.
Highlights
In the context of power grids a cascading outage is a sequence of failures and disconnections triggered by an initial event, which can be caused by natural phenomena, human actions or the emergence of imbalances between load and generation.An outage that affects a wide area or even the whole power grid is called “blackout” [1], and usually occurs in a time-scale that is typically too short to stop it by human intervention.In this respect, most of the major blackouts in power grids have been generally caused by an initial event that unchains a series of “cascading failures” [2,3,4,5,6,7], with very severe consequences
The protection of critical infrastructures has become a priority for Governments since terrorist groups may potentially take advantage of vulnerabilities and interdependencies in power grids [50,110,111,112,113], threats that make robustness and resilience even more crucial. With this complex scenario in mind, the purpose of this paper is to review the works that have tackled the robustness of power grids by using the Complex Networks (CN) approach, those based solely on topological CN concepts (“pure topological approach”), and those that enhance the CN approach by including concepts from EE (“hybrid approaches”), in which the so-called “extended topological model” developed by Bompard et al [8,78] plays a key role
In this survey we have reviewed the most representative contributions gravitating on the analysis of robustness in power grids by means of concepts borrowed from the theory of Complex Networks (CN)
Summary
An outage that affects a wide area or even the whole power grid is called “blackout” [1], and usually occurs in a time-scale that is typically too short to stop it by human intervention. In this respect, most of the major blackouts in power grids have been generally caused by an initial event (for instance, critical loads) that unchains a series of “cascading failures” [2,3,4,5,6,7], with very severe consequences. There seems to exist no single framework capable of uncontroversially explaining neither their inner nonlinear dynamics nor their pervasiveness [7,11,33], due to the complexity of the topic in itself [7,39] and because of the disconnection between the CN and EE communities [11], and the scientific controversy about whether the pure CN theory is able to provide insights into real power grids
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