Selection of the Disruptive Nodes to Destroy Power Grid

Due to the decentralization and complexity of network topology in power grid, the key substations are easily damaged. The disaster like the North American blackout in 2003 give us a warning about the control of power grid. It is vital that the key substations or destructive nodes to destroy the power grid are recognized firstly. Hence, in this paper the several functions to determine the importance of nodes in a complex network were adopted to search for the destructive nodes in a power grid. The implementing procedure and the basic principle of different functions to select disruptive nodes are firstly introduced. Then the node data from Western United States power grid was taken as an example, in order to check and compare the effectiveness of each functions mentioned above. The results show that the selected destructive nodes by three methods are diverse from each other. The distribution of important vector by the degree method shows a step mode, while a very good continuity is obtained by the AD method.