A Novel Approach for the Identification of Influential Node in an Electric Power Grid

The continuous occurrence of blackouts due to cascading failures and voltage instability which has the effect of damaging several components within the grid has of recent been traced to sudden disconnection of influential node in a power network. How to identify this node has become a crucial issue to power system utilities. In this paper, an approach which is based on the network topological properties of an electric power system is investigated for the identification of influential node in a power network. First, we established a matrix which capture information between an electrical interconnection that exist between load to load nodes in a power network. Next, the suggested network structurally based eigenvector centrality measure (NSECM) is formulated based on the established matrix. A comparison analysis with a conventional eigenvector centrality measure is also performed to determine the significance of the proposed method. The effectiveness of all the approaches presented is tested on both practical 26-bus and the IEEE 14-bus power systems. Results obtained show that identification of influential node in a power network is better done using the NSECM method as it reduces the computational burden.