Does topological information matter for power grid vulnerability?

Power grids, which are playing an important role in supporting the economy of a region as well as the life of its citizens, could be attacked by terrorists or enemies to damage the region. Depending on different levels of power grid information collected by the terrorists, their attack strategies might be different. This paper groups power grid information into four levels: no information, purely topological information (PTI), topological information with generator and load nodes (GLNI), and full information (including component physical properties and flow parameters information), and then identifies possible attack strategies for each information level. Analyzing and comparing power grid vulnerability under these attack strategies from both terrorists' and utility companies' point of view give rise to an approach to quantify the relative values of these three types of information, including PTI, GLNI, and component parameter information (CPI). This approach can provide information regarding the extent to which topological information matters for power system vulnerability decisions. Taking several test systems as examples, results show that for small attacks with p ≤ 0.1, CPI matters the most; when taking attack cost into consideration and assuming that the terrorists take the optimum cost-efficient attack intensity, then CPI has the largest cost-based information value.