Analysis of Electric Grid Security Under Terrorist Threat

IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 19, pp. 905‐912.The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TPWRS.2004.825888Center for Infrastructure Defense (CID) Paper.We describe new analytical techniques to help mitigate the disruptions to electric power grids caused by terrorist attacks. New bilevel mathematical models and algorithms identify critical system components (e.g., transmission lines, generators, transformers) by creating maximally disruptive attack plans for terrorists assumed to have limited offensive resources. We report results for standard reliability test networks to show that the tech- niques identify critical components with modest computational effort