Cascading failures in power grid under three node attack strategies*

Abstract

This paper studies cascading failures of power grid under three node attack strategies based on the local preferential redistribution rule of the broken node's load. The initial load of a node with degree k is k β, and β is a tunable parameter. We investigated the cascading propagation of US power grid under three node attack strategies and analyzed their attack effects. The three node attack strategies are HL (attack the node with the highest load), HPC (attack the node with the highest proportion between the capacity of the attacked node and the total capacities of the neighboring nodes), LL (attack the node with the lowest load). Study shows that the attack effect of HPC is the best one of the three in most cases. The attack effects of the three node attack strategies are compared with those of the three edge attack strategies. It is found that in a big range of β, the effect based on a node attack strategy is better than that based on the corresponding edge attack strategy. So in most cases, attacking the important nodes is more harmful than attacking the important edges in power grid. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.