Reliability and vulnerability of Power Transmission Grid in Iran:A Complex Systems Approach

Power grids are one of the most important and critical infrastructures which societies rely upon for well-being. It has been argued that conventional reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) methodologies may be inadequate to analyze the complexity of the failure and repair behavior of complex power grids. The analyses have to go beyond the conventional cause-and-effect and fault tree analyses to be able to capture spill-over clusters of failures and cascading when strong interdependencies exist. In fact, it is well known that the behavior that emerges in a complex network such as power grids can hardly be described as the sum of the behaviors of its components, whereas conventional risk and reliability analysis techniques are founded on a premise that a system can be broken into parts and parts into smaller parts, in order to enable quantification. In this paper, we investigate, the structural vulnerability properties of the very high voltage (400kv) power transmission network of Iran from a complex systems approach