Identification of critical line-generation combinations for hypothesized joint line-generation attacks

The increasing load demand is pushing power system to operate near its limit, making it more vulnerable to various disturbances and attacks, especially those that might initiate cascading failures. In this study, the joint line-generation attack is introduced which assumes that the lines and generators can be tripped by malicious attacks simultaneously, and it is a natural extension of the previous node-only or line-only attacks. The joint line-generation attack strategy is explored based on a search space reduction algorithm. The simulation is conducted based on several representative test systems. The performance of the proposed attack strategy is compared with other attack strategies and the computational burden is analyzed. It is demonstrated that the proposed attack strategy is effective and computationally efficient. This work can provide some meaningful insight on how to prevent power system cascading failures initiated by joint attacks.