LAUSR

Abstract This paper develops a methodological framework to study robustness of the power network from both structural and functional perspective, and uses the central China power grid as an example to illustrate the usage and effectiveness of the proposed framework. Specifically, we use percolation to determine the phase transition process, and use controllability theory to calculate the number of minimum driver nodes in structural robustness analysis. We obtain the vulnerability curves and identify the critical dense areas that are most likely to be targets of attack in functional robustness analysis. Results show that the power network here exhibits similar characteristics as scale free network and is relatively vulnerable to deliberate attacks. Some of the dense areas in the power network are highly sensitive to terrorist attacks. The proposed framework can be applied to other infrastructure networks to give a deep understanding of the system robustness.