Transmission Line Rating Attack in Two-Settlement Electricity Markets

The potential economic impact of transmission line rating (TLR) attacks in two-settlement electricity markets is studied in this paper. We show that nodal prices in real-time markets can be manipulated via a TLR attack, which can be modeled as a bi-level optimization problem. Several acceleration techniques are developed to reduce the computational burden of solving the bi-level problem. A heuristic strategy is proposed to deal with the issue of multiplicity in pricing. The uncertainties in load are also considered in the proposed TLR model. Numerical simulations demonstrate that well-designed TLR attacks can manipulate the profits of market participants in the two-settlement markets. Benchmark testing shows that the proposed acceleration techniques can reduce computation time tremendously, and the proposed heuristic strategy can mitigate the issue of multiplicity in pricing.