Title: Structural vulnerability analysis of electric power distribution grids

Authors: Yakup Koç; Abhishek Raman; Martijn Warnier; Tarun Kumar

Addresses: Risk and Information Management Group, Department of Asset Management, Stedin, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Systems Engineering Section, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands ' Operations Research, World Wide Supply Chain and Logistics, Apple Inc., Cupertino, California, USA ' Systems Engineering Section, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands ' Smarter Energy Group, Department of Industry and Solutions, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

Abstract: Power grid outages cause huge economical and societal costs. Disruptions in the power distribution grid are responsible for a significant fraction of electric power unavailability to customers. The impact of extreme weather conditions, continuously increasing demand, and the over-ageing of assets in the grid, deteriorates the safety of electric power delivery. Measures to analyse the robustness characteristics and to identify vulnerabilities of power grids are of utmost importance. This paper proposes a metric to quantitatively assess the robustness of power distribution grids from a topological point of view. Real-world data is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed metric as a tool to assess the criticality of assets in a distribution grid.

Keywords: power distribution grids; topological robustness; structural vulnerability; metrics; complex networks; vulnerability assessment; electric power; power outages; critical infrastructure; power grids.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2016.081299

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2016 Vol.12 No.4, pp.311 - 330

Received: 16 Nov 2015
Accepted: 18 Mar 2016

Published online: 03 Jan 2017 *

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