The 2019 6th International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI 2019)
Invulnerability Analysis of Power Distribution
Network Based on Topology Structure
Liang Wang Ke Lin
State Grid Zhejiang Cixi State Grid Zhejiang Cixi
Power Supply Co., Ltd. Power Supply Co., Ltd.
Ningbo, China Ningbo, China
Abstract—In this paper, by applying complex network theory,
the invulnerability analysis of distribution network is studied
based on topological structure. Based on complex network theory,
the invulnerability evaluation and analysis method of distribution
network is studied. Not only can we get the invulnerability of
the whole network, but also the importance of each node, so we
can compare the importance of these nodes with each other. On
this basis, the invulnerability of a regional distribution network
is studied by using the obtained method, and the results are
analyzed.
Index Terms—Invulnerability, Distribution network, Topology
structure, Complex network, Node importance
I. I NTRODUCTION
Distribution network [1], [2], as the terminal link of power
system, receives electric energy from transmission network
or regional power plants and distributes it to various users
of different voltage levels through distribution facilities, thus
to provide users with safe and high-quality power supply
services. According to statistics, most users’blackouts are
caused by the distribution links in the power system. Because
of the reasons of excessive consideration of economy and
unreasonable planning in the early construction of distribu-
tion network in China, the distribution network in China is
relatively fragile in many aspects.
Under the background of building a strong smart grid, it
is becoming more and more important to select a distribution
network topology with high security, high technology and high
power quality, to improve the anti-destruction performance
of distribution network and to enhance the sustained power
supply capability of distribution network under emergencies.
The invulnerability of distribution network directly affects the
overall robustness of the power grid. A simple component
failure may cause cascades of failures across the power grid
and lead to a large blackout. A number of recent large
blackouts in Europe, North America and India have empha-
sized the importance of understanding the structure feature
of the distribution network. Therefore, the evaluation of the
invulnerability of distribution network based on topological
structure has become an urgent task to be solved.
The invulnerability of distribution network refers to the
ability of power distribution network to provide continuous
and reliable power supply to users through its own regulation
when some components become invalid due to sudden acci-
978-1-7281-5255-1 ©2019 IEEE 330
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Wei Zhang Liangzhong Fan
State Grid Zhejiang Cixi Ningbo Institute of Technology,
Power Supply Co., Ltd. Zhejiang University
Ningbo, China Ningbo, China
dents such as component failure, intentional attack or natural
disasters, and so on.
Complex network is the common abstraction and description
for complex system and it emphasizes the topology character
of system. For example, power networks can be described as
a network model, which can be transformed into complex
network theory for research. Since the discovery of small-
world effect [3] and scale-free characteristics [4] of complex
networks, the study of complex networks has penetrated
into economics, medicine, sociology, ecology and computer
fields [5], [6], [7], [8]. In particular, it brings new analyzing
method for distribution network of power system through pure
topological metrics [9], [10], [11], [12]. From the point of
view of complex network, the application of complex net-
work invulnerability analysis method to distribution network
topology structure analysis is of great practical significance for
finding network structure defects, improving network security
and reliability, and guiding power grid construction planning.
Up to now, only a few papers have considered the application
of complex network approaches for analyzing modern distri-
bution networks.
In this paper, the structural invulnerability of distribution
network has been studied by using purely topological ap-
proaches. This paper focuses on the overall topology analysis
of distribution network. Analysis has been done by modeling
power grid as a complex network and applying the concepts
from graph theory.
II. M ODEL AND ANALYSIS APPROACH
Now, we can represent an distribution network as a con-
nected undirected network G = (V, E), to analyze its inherent
structure feature.
A concrete network G = (V, E) can be regarded as a graph
composed of point set V and edge set E. In a network graph G,
V is a collection of all nodes in a graph, and E is a collection
of all directly connected edges between nodes in a graph.
Suppose G has n node points, i.e., V = {v1 , v2 , · · · , vn }.
We first give a brief review on some basic theoretical con-
cepts about graph G. If the node pair (vi , vj ) ∈ E and the node
pair (vj , vi ) ∈ E correspond to the same edge, the network
corresponding to the graph is called undirected network. A
graph G is said to be connected, if for every pair of nodes
there exists a path between them. In a connected networks,
all nodes of this network can communicate information with Definition II.3. Let vi ∈ V be a node in a network G. The
each other. The adjacency matrix A of a graph G is defined node importance Gi of node vi is defined as
as ⎛ ⎞ Di
a11 a12 · · · a1n Gi = , i = 1, 2, · · · , n,
⎜ a21 a22 · · · a2n ⎟ Si
⎜ ⎟
A=⎜ . .. .. .. ⎟ where Di is the degree of node vi for i = 1, 2, · · · , n.
⎝ .. . . . ⎠
an1 an2 ··· ann The definition indicates that the greater the degree of a
node and the smaller its node location importance, the more
where  important the node is.
1, (vi , vj ) ∈ E; Now, we can define the network invulnerability as follows.
aij =
0, (vi , vj ) ∈ E.
Definition II.4. Let G = (V, E) be a network and Ḡ is the
The number of adjacent edges of a node vi is called the degree fully connected network corresponding to the network G. The
of vi , which is denoted by Di . It is not difficult to check that network invulnerability of G is defined as
the degree Di of a node vi equals the sum of the elements
n
Gi
in ith row of the adjacency matrix A. Degree is a simple and N I(G) = i=1 ,
important concept for describing node attributes. Intuitively, Q

n
the greater the degree of a node, the more important the node where Q = i=1 Ḡi is the sum of the node importance of all
is. A path from vertex vi to vertex vj is a sequence of vertices nodes in the fully connected network Ḡ.
and edges that begins with vi and end with vj . The path
Obviously, if G is a fully connected network, the network
which has minimal number of edges between two vertices is
invulnerability N I(G) satisfies that N I(G) = 1. In general
called the shortest path and the number dij of the edges in the
we only have N I(G) < 1. The greater the ratio of the sum of
shortest path between vertices vi and vj is called the shortest
the node importance of all nodes in the network G to the sum
distance. The shortest path is the most convenient way for
of the node importance of all nodes in the corresponding fully
transmitting any information between two node through the
connected network, the greater the network invulnerability of
network. In case of a power network most of the cases power
the network G.
is transmitted through the shortest path based on geographical
position to minimize the cost. III. I NVULNERABILITY ANALYSIS
Now, we can first give the definition of the node location In this section, we will applied the complex network theory
importance. to study the structure characteristics and invulnerability of
Definition II.1. Let vi ∈ V be a node in a network G. We power distribution network. The distribution network should
can define the node location importance of vi as be simplified to a topological structure diagram described with
a complex network.
n
1 The specific methods are as follows: Generators, load nodes
Si = dij , i = 1, 2, · · · , n.
n j=1 and substations are regarded as nodes in the network, and
transmission circuits are regarded as undirected edges in the
The definition shows that the smaller the average of the network. Taking a distribution network in some region of
shortest distance between the node vi and other nodes, the Ningbo as an example, after preliminary simplification, the
more important the location of node vi is. distribution network becomes a network G = (V, E) with 21
nodes and 31 edges, as shown in Figure 1.
Definition II.2. The characteristic path length is defined as Through the analysis method provided in the previous part,
n
1
the structure characteristics of Figure 1 can be analyzed in the
L= Si , following.
n i=1
A. Degree
where Si is the node location importance of node vi , i =
The degree of a network is a statistical characteristic param-
1, 2, · · · , n.
eter that describes the topological structure of a network. In
Obviously, the characteristic path length L defines the this subsection, we firstly discuss the degree in the network.
average of the shortest distance between all node pairs. For From Table I, we can see that the degree of node 1 is 10,
a simple undirected graph, since dij = dji and dii = 0, the which means that node 1 is directly connected to 10 other
above formula can be simplified as nodes. Next, the degrees of node 7 and node 3 are all 6. These
n n
nodes with large degree are located at the hub of the network.
2 The nodes with the least degree are 11, 17 and 20 respectively,
L= dij .
N (N − 1) i=1 j=i+1 and the degrees of the three nodes are all 1. The sum of all
node degrees is 60, and the average value of node degrees is
Next, we will define the node importance in the following. 2.952.

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 Node number Network
1 1.4286
2 2.1429
3 1.9048
4 2.1905
5 2.2381
6 2.1905
7 1.8571
8 1.9524
9 2.1905
10 2.1429
11 2.8095
12 2.6667
13 2.5238
14 2.1429
15 2.6190
16 2.6190
17 2.7619
18 2.7143
19 2.8095
20 3.0476
21 2.8571
characteristic path length 2.3719

TABLE II: Node location importance and characteristic path

Fig. 1: Distribution network topology diagram length

Node number Network

Node number Network 1 7.0000
1 10 2 0.9333
2 2 3 3.1500
3 6 4 0.9130
4 2 5 0.8936
5 2 6 0.9130
6 2 7 3.2308
7 6 8 2.0488
8 4 9 1.3696
9 3 10 0.9333
10 2 11 0.3559
11 1 12 0.7500
12 2 13 1.1887
13 3 14 1.4000
14 3 15 1.1455
15 3 16 1.1455
16 3 17 0.3621
17 1 18 0.7368
18 2 19 0.7119
19 2 20 0.3281
20 1 21 0.7000
21 2 Sum of nodes importance 30.2099
Sum of the degree 62 Network invulnerability 0.0685
Average of the degree 2.952
TABLE III: The invulnerability of the network
TABLE I: The degree of the network

C. invulnerability of the network

B. Node location importance and characteristic path length
The node location importance and characteristic path length
is analyzed in Table II. The smaller the node location im-
portance, the more important the location of this node is.
The nodes, which have node location importance less than 2,
include node 1, node 3, node 7, and node 8. The node location
importance of node 20 is more than 3. The characteristic path
length L of this network G is 2.3719, which means that the
average of the shortest distance between all node pairs is
2.3719.
By making use of the method in Scetion 2, the and the
invulnerability of the network can be obtained. The results are
shown in Table III.
From the Table III, we can see that:
(1) Node 1 has the highest importance, which is 7, followed
by node 7 and node 3, respectively. Node 20 has the
smallest importance, and the importance is 0.3281. It is
easy to see that the importance of nodes is proportional
to the number of edges connected in the network. The
greater the degree of the node, the greater the importance
of the node. Vice versa. Node 20 has the smallest

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 Sequence number Newly added edge New invulnerability Algorithm 1 Procedure of distribution network planning
1 (v3 , v7 ) 0.0742
2 (v1 , v15 ) 0.0733 1: Set E = E0 , j = 1;
3 (v1 , v16 ) 0.0733
4 (v1 , v13 ) 0.0732
5 (v3 , v16 ) 0.0732
2: Traverse all the edges l ∈ Ē \ Ej−1 , define El = Ej−1 ∪ l
and Gl = (V, El );
TABLE IV: The invulnerability after adding one new edge in
the network 3: Calculate the network invulnerability N I(Gl ) for all l ∈
Ē \ E and assume lj = argmaxl∈Ē\E N I(Gl );

importance, and the importance is 0.3281. It is easy to 4: Output lj ;

see that the importance of nodes is proportional to the
number of edges connected in the network. The greater 5: If j = m, break; otherwise, set Ej = Ej−1 ∪lj , j = j +1,
the degree of the node, the greater the importance of the and return to step 2;
node. Vice versa.
(2) It is not difficult to see that the importance of the
network nodes varies greatly. When the network invul-
nerability is about the same, the uniformity of network
node importance plays an important role. Generally
speaking, the more uniform the importance of nodes,
the more interconnected all nodes are, and the network
has better robustness.
(3) The network invulnerability N I(G) is 0.0685. In order
to improve the network invulnerability, more connection-
s can be added between nodes, that is, new edges can
be added in the network. For this distribution network
we studied, the edge that makes the maximum increase
in network invulnerability should be (v3 , v7 ). When this
edge is added to the network, the network invulnerability
can be increased from 0.0685 to 0.0742, and the network
invulnerability can be increased by 8.3%. The 5 nodes
with the largest increase in network survivability are
shown in Table IV.

D. distribution network planning issues

In this subsection, we consider the following distribution
network planning issues: in order to improve the invulner-
ability of distribution network, m transmission lines will be
constructed in sequence in the future. How should we plan and
construct these m transmission lines to improve the network
invulnerability most?
Let Ḡ = (V̄ , Ē) be the corresponding fully connected
network, where, obviously, V̄ = V and E ⊂ Ē. Assume
0 < m ≤ N, where N is the number of the edges in Ē \E. To
solve above problem, we present framework of the distribution
network planning in Algorithm 1.
For example, we will discuss a special case of the distribu-
tion network planning problem for m = 3, which implies
that 3 transmission lines will be constructed in sequence
to improve the network invulnerability. By making use of
Algorithm 1, three edges can be selected in order, which
are (v3 , v7 ), (v1 , v21 ), (v1 , v20 ). The new topological structure
diagram with adding 3 edges is presented by Figure 2. As
shown in Table V, the importance of each node increases.
The network invulnerability increased from 0.0685 to 0.0839,
and the network invulnerability can be increased by 22.5%.
Fig. 2: New distribution network topology diagram
IV. C ONCLUSION
This paper study the invulnerability analysis of power
distribution network. By making use of the theory of complex
network, we get the assessment method of the invulnerability
based on the topology structure of the distribution network.
Moreover, this method is applied to analyze the invulnerability
of some region in Ningbo.
The invulnerability of distribution network has important
theoretical and applied research value. In the follow-up study
of network invulnerability, more measures or indicators can
be considered, so as to evaluate the invulnerability of network
more comprehensively, and to produce more scientific guid-
ance for practice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported by Collective Enterprises Science
and Technology Project of State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power

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 Node number Network
1 9.0000
2 0.9767
3 4.3235
4 0.9333
5 0.9333
6 0.9545
7 4.4545
8 2.1538
9 1.4318
10 0.9767
11 0.3962
12 0.8400
13 1.3125
14 1.4318
15 1.2857
16 1.2857
17 0.4038
18 0.8235
19 0.7368
20 0.9333
21 1.4318
Sum of nodes importance 37.0198
Network invulnerability 0.0839

TABLE V: The invulnerability of the new network

Co., Ltd. in 2019: Power Emergency Assessment System for

Bay Area Based on Vulnerability.
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