Power grids vulnerability is a key issue in society. A component failure may
trigger cascades of failures across the grid and lead to a large blackout.
Complex network approaches have shown a direction to study some of the problems
faced by power grids. Within Complex Network Analysis structural
vulnerabilities of power grids have been studied mostly using purely
topological approaches, which assumes that flow of power is dictated by
shortest paths. However, this fails to capture the real flow characteristics of
power grids. We have proposed a flow redistribution mechanism that closely
mimics the flow in power grids using the PTDF. With this mechanism we enhance
existing cascading failure models to study the vulnerability of power grids.
We apply the model to the European high-voltage grid to carry out a
comparative study for a number of centrality measures. `Centrality' gives an
indication of the criticality of network components. Our model offers a way to
find those centrality measures that give the best indication of node
vulnerability in the context of power grids, by considering not only the
network topology but also the power flowing through the network. In addition,
we use the model to determine the spare capacity that is needed to make the
grid robust to targeted attacks. We also show a brief comparison of the end
results with other power grid systems to generalise the result.Comment: Pre-Proceedings of CRITIS '1