Vulnerability analysis and critical components identification of Power Networks under cascading failures

Power network safety has become an important subject in safety science because power networks are basic support to modern infrastructures. This paper takes Central China Power Network (CCPN) as an example to study vulnerability and identify critical components under cascading failures induced by both node overload breakdowns and edge overload failures. As for cascading failures induced by edge overload failures, testing the response of power networks, it is concluded that the effect of different attack for network performance has close relation with the tolerate parameter and the adjustable parameter, and power networks have the best performance when the adjustable parameter equal 1 for different tolerate parameter. Meanwhile, we also find that key elements are those with high load and connections. As for cascading failures induced by node overload breakdowns, it has the similar results. Our findings will be helpful to protect the key elements to avoid cascading failure induced disasters, and they may be useful in furthering study of designing critical infrastructure systems.