Overloaded Branch Chains Induced by False Data Injection Attack in Smart Grid

Increasing integration of the information communication technology introduces security vulnerabilities into smart grid. False data injection attack can exploit the cyber vulnerabilities to compromise the physical grid without being detected. However, the existing attack strategies only consider the electrical characteristic of power flow calculation to induce multiple overloaded branches. On this basis, our attack strategy absorbs the topological adjacency of chain subgraph to induce the overloaded branch chains, which can better characterize the sequential propagation of cascading failures. To this end, a game-theoretical bilevel optimization problem is formulated to model the decision-making interaction between the upper-level attacker and the lower-level security constrained economic dispatching system. The simulation results in IEEE test systems verify that our attack strategy can induce the overloaded branch chains and justify that the overloaded branch chains are more effective than the overloaded branches in triggering the cascading failures.