Joint Cascade Vulnerability Assessment of Interdependent Power-Water Infrastructures

The joint operation and coordination of power and water infrastructures have made them more vulnerable than before to cyber-physical attacks. This is because each system relies on the other to provide its services. Such a mutual dependence increases the risk of large-scale cascading failures. Therefore, it becomes of utmost importance to analyze the vulnerability of interdependent power-water infrastructures. To accurately quantify the overall damage due to cascading failure propagation, the vulnerability assessment should consider not only the topological features but also the power dynamics and the hydraulic features. Existing works fail to identify the combination of nodes that present the greatest damage. To fill up this gap, this article proposes and examines a low-complexity vulnerability assessment strategy based on the most critical nodes, which maximizes the overall damage. Experiments are conducted on two different power-water systems. It is shown that the proposed strategy identifies the most vulnerable nodes that cause a high damage impact from either or both systems, but with a much lower computational time compared to the one that selects the target nodes based on how much damage they inflict upon the system. A visual assessment of the physical disturbances under the most vulnerable nodes is presented.