Locating Critical Lines in High-voltage Electrical Power Grids

Nowadays the issue of vulnerability and protection of critical infrastructure is attracting a great deal of attention among scientific researchers. One of the most used approaches is that of complex networks. A critical infrastructure (e.g. a power grid) is represented as a graph in which nodes represent the main components of the network (e.g. power plants or trasmission substations) and edges are the physical connections among them (i.e. the electric lines in the above example). Following this approach, several scientific works have been produced with the purpose of analyzing error and attack resilience of both artificially generated topologies and real world networks. In literature, failures and attacks have been simulated as the removal of a certain percentage either of nodes [1–5] or of edges [2, 6] of the network.