Credible Interdiction for Transmission Systems

This article presents novel formulations and algorithms for N - k interdiction problems in transmission networks. In particular, it formulates spatial and topological resource constraints on attackers for N - k interdiction problems and illustrates the formulation with two new classes of N - k attacks: spatial N - k attacks where the attack is constrained by geographic distance of a bus chosen by an attacker; and topological N - k attacks where the attack is constrained to connected components. These two specific types of N - k attacks compute interdiction plans designed to better model localized attacks, such as those induced by natural disasters or physical attacks. We then formulate these two resource-constrained interdiction problems as bilevel, max-min optimization problems, and present a novel constraint-generation algorithm to solve these formulations. Detailed case studies analyzing the behavior of spatially and topologically resource-constrained problems and comparing them to the traditional N - k interdiction problem are also presented.