Electric Power Grid Invulnerability Under Intentional Edge-Based Attacks

Abstract

Power Grid as a kind of complex network is particularly important for every country, even brings huge losses if the power grid suffered from natural or even artificial attacks. Therefore, how to investigate the vulnerable edges of the power grid with under attacks has become an important proposition. In this paper, taking the US power grid as an example, by deliberately deleting some percent of edges according to different strategies which represents different attacks apparently, we calculate the collapse degree of the attacked network by three metrics (The largest connected component G, efficiency E, and average distance L). We found that, under intentional attack on the edges with higher betweenness centrality and the ones with larger multiplication of node betweenness centrality, the US power grid is inferior in invulnerability. The methods used in this paper could be used to identify the vulnerable edges of complex networks, especially for the key infrastructures.