Identification of Vulnerable Lines in Smart Grid Systems Based on Affinity Propagation Clustering

In smart grid systems, vulnerable lines may lead to cascading failures which can cause large-scale blackouts. Successfully detecting vulnerable lines can increase the stability of the smart grid systems and reduce the risk of cascading failures. By modeling a smart grid system into a directed graph, we investigate the problem of vulnerable line identification from a clustering perspective. By jointly considering the topological parameters and the electrical properties, we propose an affinity propagation-based bus clustering algorithm to classify buses into clusters, where the center of each cluster represents the most influential bus in each partition. According to the clustering results, we design a vulnerable line identification scheme, which captures different types of potential critical lines in the smart grid system. Experiments over the IEEE-39 bus system demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of our proposed algorithm.