Critical Links Identification for Selective Outages in Interdependent Power-Communication Networks

Critical infrastructure, such as the smart grid, is vulnerable to failures and attacks. The complex nature of these systems embeds hidden vulnerabilities that threaten their functionality when exploited. In this paper, we perform a vulnerability analysis of the smart grid based on the power flow dynamics and in the presence of the essential communication network. Our analysis identifies a small number of power lines and communication links that can trigger a cascading failure and result in a blackout when removed. We quantify the failure effect in the form of fractional loss in the served load. Moreover, we formulate a mathematical model to present both components of the smart grid and their interdependency. A scalable algorithm is introduced to analyze the output of the model. We evaluate the proposed model and algorithm on the IEEE 14, 30, 57, and 300 Bus systems and associated communication networks, and report on the collected results.