Improvement of SCADA-Based Preventive Control Under Budget Constraints

Catastrophic disasters in real-world systems, such as large-scale blackouts in power grids, are usually triggered by minor incidents, which culminate in a complex cascading failure in an interdependent system. Because the loss of a power transmission line disrupts the control information piggybacked on the line, failures in the power network may consequently disrupt monitoring and control of the system. Hence, reliable functioning of the communication network in support of monitoring and control is vital to ensure that the re-dispatch-based preventive control effectively restricts cascade propagation. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a novel scheme in designing the communication network comprised of both power line carrier communication (PLCC) links and non-PLCC (e.g., microwave) links in preparation of possible failures under a budget constraint on the communication link deployment cost. First, we characterize the fundamental hardness of our problem. Next, we develop a solvable Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP)-based algorithm, which attains a constant-factor approximation under certain conditions. Finally, we show via simulations on the IEEE 118-bus system that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performance in terms of enabling more accurate topology estimation and more served demand in the face of cascades.