Computational analysis of network survivability with application to power systems

The operability of society’s critical infrastructures depends on the availability of electric power. Adverse events (natural disasters, intelligent adversary, etc.) occur rarely, but power system failure under such conditions has typically devastating effects on the economy and lives. A key factor in the system’s ability to withstand massive sudden damage caused by adverse events is its topology: the number of system elements that generate and demand power and the connections between them. The topology factor can be quantified by analyzing the impact of all possible combinations of unrecoverable faults (fault scenarios) on the availability and connectivity of system elements. As the number of possible fault scenarios grows as 2M with increasing number M of system elements, such an analysis becomes a computational challenge for large-scale systems. The paper discusses possibilities of reducing the computational complexity of the problem.