Security analysis of smart grids - a complex network perspective

Complex network theory is useful and effective in analyzing power system security because of increased complexities and uncertainties in smart grid development. Traditional complex network models based on topological structure is unable to address some important electrical properties of power grids. Therefore, such models have many limitations when assessing the vulnerability of power grids and cannot analyze smart grids with cyber-physical dynamics. In this paper, a new approach based on the power adjacency matrix (PAM) is proposed to perform security assessment of power grids by taking into account not only the topological connection of the physical network, but also the efficiency of power flow on each edge. Vulnerability analysis is carried out by introducing PAM, the updating process of which can primarily describe the trends of electrical network dynamics. Finally, a case study (IEEE 118 bus system) is conducted based on both traditional and proposed models. Simulation results show that the proposed PAM based approach is very reasonable and precise for structural vulnerability analysis on power networks. (4 pages)