Interdiction Analysis of Electric Grids Combining Cascading Outage and Medium-Term Impacts

This paper presents an improved interdiction model to identify maximal electric grid attacks. The contribution of the model is that it incorporates both short-term (seconds to minutes) and medium-term (minutes to days) impacts of the possible attack. The medium-term impacts are examined by an interdicted dc optimal power flow model. The short-term impacts are addressed by a cascading outage analysis model that uses a set of sequentially applied checkers to perform the simulation of the cascading outage events and assess the short-term impacts of a blackout subsequent to specified terrorist attacks. An integer programming heuristic is applied that can utilize standard optimization software (e.g. CPLEX) to solve master problems generated by the heuristic. The proposed model has been verified using the IEEE 300-Bus Test System and IEEE RTS 96 Test System. Discussions of the results and future research plans are also presented in this paper.