Identification of Critical Buses based on Betweenness-Centrality in a Smart Grid

This paper explores several reliability indices to quantify the importance of buses in IEEE-118 and IEEE-300 bus test systems and determine which buses are key to operations of a simulated smart grid. A list of Critical Bus Indices (CBI) were formulated using principles of graph theory. Several parameters such as betweenness-centrality (BC), degree, demand, generation, and their combinations for each bus with in the test systems were explored. Efficiency of these indices in quantifying the importance of buses to the operation of the systems was validated by a node (bus) removal process. Node removal measures the disruption of the system under failure scenarios. System disruption was quantified by changes in normalized expected geodesic distance (NEGD) and normalized expected electric distance (NEED). Preliminary results provide promising insight in identifying the utility of betweenness-centrality in quantifying the importance of buses.