Critical line identification for hypothesized multiple line attacks against power systems

Abstract

Growing vandalism and terrorist activities pose great challenges to securing the modern power grid. As a practical high-impact, low-frequency threat, the attackers could simultaneously sabotage multiple critical transmission lines in a coordinated manner to initiate the cascading failure for causing great blackout. Thus, it is pressing to study the hypothesized multiple line attack strategies. In this study, the static strategy, dynamic strategy and space-pruning searching strategy are proposed for more effectively identifying the critical lines in the multiple line attack scenarios. And the optimal selection of critical lines in the multiple lines attack is determined based on the criticality of the lines, which is modeled by several mathematical indices developed from graph theory or based on enumeration. The effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies is tested using three bulk IEEE test systems. This study provides some meaningful insights about malicious attacks targeting the critical transmission lines.