Vulnerability assessment of the electric power and communication composite system

Communication system provides technical support for observability and controllability of Wide-Area Power System. However, communication faults such as time delay. bit error and interruption may lead to abnormal operation, sometimes even causing cascaded failure in electric power system. Therefore. it is important to perform the vulnerability assessment of electric power and communication system in order to provide warnings and protect the system weak links. To evaluate the interaction of composite systems. an incidence matrix is proposed to represent the connection pattern of the electric power system and communication system. A vulnerability matrix is established to evaluate the vulnerability of composite system by using the methods including vulnerability index of communication system and vulnerability of electric power communication service interaction. Electrical dissecting method is also performed for paths between sources and flows in power network for evaluation purpose. The proposed method is presented and validated in this paper by using an example of a simple composite system.