Structural Vulnerability of Power Grid Under Malicious Node-Based Attacks

Abstract

In recent years, the collapse of power grid in many countries not only has brought great inconvenience to national life, but also caused huge economic losses. Therefore, it is particularly important to analyze the vulnerability of network structure of power grid. In this paper, US power grid with 4941 nodes and 6594 edges is taken as examples. The network is attacked by deleting some percent nodes according to degree, k-shell value, betweenness centrality, and clustering coefficient, apparently. The largest connected component G, efficiency E, and average distance L are analyzed for measuring vulnerability of US power grid. The simulation results show that, in view of the largest connected component G and efficiency E, Betweenness Centrality-based attack is most destructive to the network structure than other attacks, and the attack based on Aggregation coefficient is the least destructive.