Cascading Events in the Aftermath of a Targeted Physical Attack on the Power Grid

This work studies the consequences of a human-initiated targeted attack on the electric power system by simulating the detonation of a bomb at one or more substations in and around Washington DC. An AC power flow based transient analysis on a realistic power grid model of Eastern Interconnection is considered to study the cascading events. A detailed model of control and protection system in the power grid is considered to ensure the accurate representation of cascading outages. Particularly, the problem of identifying a set of k critical nodes, whose failure/attack leads to the maximum adverse impact on the power system has been analyzed in detail. It is observed that a greedy approach yields node sets with higher criticality than a degree-based approach, which has been suggested in many prior works. Furthermore, it is seen that the impact of a targeted attack exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of the target set size k. The consideration of hidden failures in the protective relays has revealed that the outage of certain lines/buses in the course of cascading events can save the power grid from a system collapse. Finally, a comparison with the DC steady state analysis of cascading events shows that a transient stability assessment is necessary to obtain the complete picture of cascading events in the aftermath of a targeted attack on the power grid.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Meyur, Rounak

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Centeno, Virgilio A.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Kekatos, Vasileios
• Marathe, Madhav V.

• Cascading failures
• targeted attack
• hidden failures

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/88795

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/88795