Evaluation of the Most Harmful Malicious Attacks in Power Systems Based on a New Set of Centralities

Abstract

This paper aims to present an evaluation of targeted attack sequences based on a new set of power traffic centrality measures according to the vulnerability prediction measure (VPM) approach. A framework for evaluation of attack proposed in previous work is applied using three fault strategies: remove most central element first (RMCEF), iterated most central element first, and iterated electrical most damaging element first (IMDEF). For attacks on nodes, the reliability of the IMDEF strategy is confirmed, as it was the most predictive in terms of the VPM. Nevertheless, in attacks performed on links, the IMDEF does not always represents the most harmful attack. Regarding the new centralities, the Katz centrality consistently presented high values of VPM for attacks on nodes and links, with results that are comparable to degree and eigenvector centralities. In terms of execution times, the percolation centrality is not recommended, as it presented the highest execution times. The RMCEF strategy with degree, eigenvector and Katz centralities is a good estimation of the most harmful attack sequences on nodes and links with a shorter execution time than the IMDEF.