Power grid vulnerability ranking: a linear programming approach

This paper addresses the vulnerability assessment problem of the smart grid using a linear programming approach. Historically, a large number of cascading failures resulted from overflow of transmission lines, motivated the analysis of power grid vulnerability from the perspective of network flow. In order to quickly assess and protect the power grid from potential threat of system stress during any operating interval, a generalized functional vulnerability assessment framework is developed here. The developed vulnerability analysis framework is based on a network flow based centrality measurement of the power grid. The proposed method presents three advantages in comparison with existing works on network flow based vulnerability assessment model for power grid: elimination of combinatoric solution and computationally efficiency. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated through simulation on standard IEEE and European test systems.