Knowing

power grids and

understanding complexity science1
M. Rosas-Casals,2* S. Bologna,3 E. Bompard,4 G. D'Agostino,3 W. Ellens, 5,6 G. A.
Pagani,7 A. Scala,8,9 T. Verma6

Abstract
Complex networks theory has been well established as a useful framework for studying
and analyzing structure, dynamics and evolution of many complex systems.
Infrastructural and man-made systems like power grids, gas and water networks and the
internet, have been also included in this network framework, albeit sometimes ignoring
the huge historical body of knowledge surrounding them. Although there seems to exist
clear evidence that both complexity approach in general, and complex networks in
particular, can be useful, it is necessary and profitable to put forward some of the limits
that this scheme is facing when dealing with not so complex but rather complicated
systems like the power grid. In this position paper we offer a critical revision of the
usefulness of the complexity and complex networks approach in this later case,
highlighting both its strengths and weaknesses. At the same time we emphasize the
disconnection between the so called complex and the more traditional engineering
communities as one of the major drawbacks in the advent of a true body of
understanding (more than simply knowing) the subtleties of this kind of complex
systems.

Engineered systems and complexity

Complexity can be considered a relatively new and basically interdisciplinary field that
deals with the so called complex systems (rdi 2007, Gros 2008). It is worth to stress
that although experimental observations are possible, these are usually not considered a
part of the field of complex systems itself, which is primarily devoted to theoretical
developments (Newman 2011). Although there is no general agreement on a strict
1
This research grew out and includes the final summary of the SESAME (Securing the European
Electricity Supply Against Malicious and accidental thrEats) workshop held at the 7th International
Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security (CRITIS 2012), on September 18th, in
Lillehammer (Norway).
2*
Sustainability Measurement and Modelling Lab., Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya-Barcelona Tech,
Terrassa (Spain). To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: [email protected]
3
National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development-ENEA,
Bologna (Italy)
4
Joint Research Centre, Institute for Energy and Transport, Petten (The Netherlands)
5
Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research-TNO, The Hague (The Netherlands)
6
Delft University of Technology -TU Delft, Delft (The Netehrlands)
7
Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Groningen, Groningen
(The Netherlands)
8
ISC-CNR Physics Dept., Univ. "La Sapienza", Roma (Italy)
9
London Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Mayfair, London (United Kingdom)

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definition of a complex system, these are usually composed of many interacting units
often called agents (which can be consumers, species, vehicles, neurons, etc.) capable
of many different types of interactions (Nature 2008). This definition is usually
completed with that of emergent behavior, so that the collective behavior of those parts
together is more than the sum of their individual ones. These emergent phenomena are
usually related with nonlinear positive and negative feedback loops among composing
parts (which means that small changes in the initial conditions can have a big effect at a
global level) and the appearance of self-organizing processes, which tends to drive them
out of any perennial static equilibrium (i.e., classical thermodynamic principles do not
apply). Classic and so-believed examples of complex systems include ecosystems,
insect colonies, human societies, financial markets and infrastructural systems like the
Internet, road networks, gas pipe work or the power grid.

In the particular later context of power networks, complexity appears as hotchpotch

where many different concepts from complexity science have been applied and
analyzed. Efforts involved in trying to characterize the power grid as a complex system
have revolved essentially around the following issues [see (Mei, Zhang et al. 2011) for a
complete review and references therein]:

Criticality

As said before, self-organizing processes are one usual outcome of complex systems. In
any self-organizing process, a pattern appears that can be clearly recognized and, far
from subjective opinions, statistically quantified. Among the many statistical signatures
of self-organization, those involved in the characterization of phase-transitions and
critical states have become the most remarkable, like scaling relations, power-law
divergences of some quantities, universality, fractality, etc. Notably, the appearance of
algebraic probability distributions, especially power laws, in terms of event or object
sizes, is often thought to be the signature of hierarchy, robustness, criticality and
universal underlying mechanisms (Bak 1996). In the case of power transmission
networks, time series of usual measures of blackout size like energy not served, power
loss or number of customers affected, have been shown to be algebraically distributed in
many countries. This apparent ubiquitous evidence have led to believe and try to
demonstrate that power systems tend to self-organize near a critical point and that there
may be some universality ruling the inner depths of these systems [see (Dobson,
Carreras et al. 2007) for a complete review and references therein].

Complex networks

In the last years, complex networks theory has appeared as a new framework to study
complex systems (Newman 2010). A network is a simplified representation of a system.
It reduces it to a graph, an abstract entity that captures essentially its structure. Although
some amount of specificity is lost, this is an advantage when questions that arise from
difficult hypothesis can be answered with limited computational power and simplifying
assumptions. Complex networks theory applied to infrastructures in general, and power

2
grid systems in particular, has produced a huge amount of literature basically centered
around the three following issues:

Structure. In order to understand the structure of the interactions between the

components of a network, much effort has been done in defining metrics to
characterize the topology of real networks [see (Pagani, Aiello 2011) for a
complete review and references therein]. Some of them, such as the degree (i.e.,
number of edges connecting an element to others), degree probability
distribution, clustering coefficient (i.e., number of connected triples) and
average path length (i.e., number of edges needed to travel from one element of
the graph to another) have been used thoroughly in order to identify unifying
principles and common statistical properties which, in turn, has allowed the
development of models of networks (Boccaletti, Latora et al. 2006). A complete
characterization of a networks topology is motivated by the expectancy that
modeling the structure of a complex network would lead to a better
understanding of its evolutionary mechanisms and to a better comprehension of
its dynamical and functional behavior (Sol, Ferrer i Cancho et al. 2003). In the
case of power grids, some of the questions addressed with the analysis of the
structure of their topology have tried to answer which are the measures that best
characterize it and whether they are useful in order to understand and classify
these systems. If topology and dynamics are deeply interwoven, another
important question is whether we can find evidences of weak (or conversely
robust) topologies and how different topologies stand the impact of different
kinds of damages. This last aspect is essential for a critical infrastructure as the
power grid.

Dynamics. In the case of complex networks, dynamics refers to the case in

which the processes involved in the redistribution of flows are taken into
account. It involves the modeling of flows of the physical quantities of interest
over the network. In power networks it has been basically used to model
blackouts and the robustness of the network to withstand malfunctions and
attacks (Albert, Jeong et al. 2000, Motter, Lai 2002). When it comes to modeling
the dynamics, the situation is far more complicated since the components of a
network may have different dynamical behaviors and flows are often a highly
variable quantity, both in space and time. The usual shortcut to overcome these
difficulties has been the assumption of a characteristic load of an element as a
measure of its capacity and the association of this load to a topological measure
defined on it. The most used topological measure has been one standard measure
of node centrality (Boccaletti, Latora et al. 2006): the so called betweenness
centrality of that element (i.e., how many shortest paths cross that particular
node or edge). The robustness of the network has been analyzed by means of
cascading processes, where an element of the system, characterized by a finite
capacity (i.e., the maximum load that this element can handle and directly
correlated to its topological value of betweenness) is eliminated. This fact

3
 changes the shortest paths between nodes and, consequently, the distribution of
loads, creating overloads on some other nodes that, similarly, are eliminated
from the network. This leads to a new redistribution of loads and the new
overloaded nodes are removed. The redistribution process continues until when,
at a certain time, all the remaining nodes have values under or equal to its
capacity. Somehow related to this analysis, there has been lately remarkable
research in network synchronization, where networks of oscillators with
particular distributions of frequencies are interpreted as models of frequency
synchronization dynamics among generators and loads. (Lozano, Buzna et al.
2012)

Evolution. In analyzing topology and dynamics of any networked system, we

usually can only see the present outcome of a huge evolving process taking
place in multiple spatial and temporal scales. Such process is driven by multiple
and, usually, unknown forces. As these unknown forces shape and, at the same
time, are being shaped by the evolving structure and dynamics of the network,
its growth can be an intricate process. Here dynamics impels new topological
forms that, at the same time, modify the flows of information between its
constituents. Therefore, in order to fully comprehend a network we must deal
with its evolution, as well as with its structure and topology. Unlike social
networks for example, where topologies and dynamics can be easily retrieved
from past accumulated data (Kumar, Novak et al. 2006, Leskovec, Kleinberg et
al. 2007), information regarding past evolutionary stages in infrastructural
systems is difficult to obtain and usually not available at all. This drawback
complicates the processes of corroborating assumptions imposed by models or
validating the appearance of other intermediate evolutionary processes. With
very few exceptions, like in (Buzna, Issacharoff et al. 2009), very little is known
about the evolution of infrastructural networks. Its study is an essential
component of the complex networks research agenda in order to shed light on
some fundamental questions. As networked systems grow by adding elements
and, at the same time, by coupling their dynamics to those already present, the
level of interaction between elements varies and this process modifies the fluxes
of information and energy flows. Infrastructure networks in general (and power
grids in particular) belong to the engineering field, where objectives and
constraints are clear a priori. However, most technological networks have been
continuously going through changes, spanning and crossing urban and natural
systems from their early stages, adapting and being adapted by human societies,
landscapes, territories and other constraints. This adaptive process has the power
to modify the initial objective functions.

Complex or complicated?
There are huge conceptual and practical problems when engineering and complexity
sciences are tried to be connected. The truth is that finding most of the characteristics of

4
complex systems in man-made ones like the power grid is a difficult task. Concepts like
emergence, self-organization and adaptation are far from the engineering purposes and
difficult, if not impossible, to experience in the man-made realm. Engineering is about
assembling pieces that work in specific ways: that is, designing (complicated or not so)
systems. These systems are robust in terms of redundancies but not adaptation: once a
transmission line is constructed, it remains there for years to come and the system must
deal with its fixed topology, and associated impact in the systems dynamics, whether it
is beneficial for the whole functioning scheme or not in the long term. In the power grid
case, self-organization does not exist: synchronization and phase angles must be
maintained constantly under schedule. And so, it cannot lead to any kind of emergent
behavior or pose the system to any critical state (if we consider blackouts not as an
emergent phenomenon but as an expected malfunction output and so, understandable
from the individual behaviors of the systems composing elements).

Complexity and network theory have offered a new and fresh approach to an old
system, that of the power grid. However, and paradoxically, it seems its usefulness has
been relatively undermined by its oversimplifying assumptions. From a general
conceptual point of view, there is one main drawback associated to the
oversimplification of any real power network. This is that for power grids we can (a)
obtain a closed form mathematical model of the many equations that assess the physical
system and (b) manage to solve it in the time it is needed (being it off-line or even on-
line). Thus, the question about why do we need simplified (or approximated) complex
networks models if we can get better answers with fully precise models seems a natural
and obvious one. The approach offered by complex networks theory, with purely
topological analysis (or even extended ones to take into account minimal electrical
information), has been useful in order to detect critical components and evaluate
topological robustness. The assessment of these results has been done by means of
correlating these topological and extended degrees (Bompard, Napoli et al. 2009) with
load shedding in real systems (over several time spans) or even with statistical failure
data of real blackouts and failures (Sol, Rosas-Casals et al. 2008). However results
have been not conclusive and their applicability could not be generalized. Graph theory
and applied statistical physics alone cannot account for a full characterization of an
electricity grid: there is a need for the deeper interplay between structural and electrical
aspects.

As far as the dynamics is concerned, it is important here to stress the meaning of

dynamical behavior (or simply dynamics) when dealing with complex networks, in
contrast with its meaning in the power generation, operation and control field. While
complex networks dynamics is related to the flow of information, energy or matter
through the networked system and the different temporal values that characterize the
resulting feature vector, power systems dynamics is related to frequency,
synchronization, swings and transient stability performance. If the word dynamics is
used as in the complex networks acceptation, power grids seem to be an optimal
candidate for the kind of dynamic analysis presented above, since cascading failures

5
have been usually the prologue to huge blackouts (Nedic, Dobson et al. 2006). But at
the same time, power system operation, flow and generation turns out to be one of the
most mathematically complicated problems encountered in engineering nowadays. All
the variables and processes involved in such calculations demonstrate that power grids
do not concentrate flows depending on topological centrality measures (like
betweenness) nor the pool of sinks and sources are necessarily constrained by shortest
paths (Wood, Wollenberg 1996). Therefore, most of the initial complex networks
dynamic models encountered in the literature have only a qualitative role as explanatory
theory. Although they provide some indications on the actions that can be performed in
order to decrease undesired effects such as congestions, avalanches of node breakdown
and cascading failures, these are not realistic neither sufficiently accurate to explain the
power grid dynamics. If the word dynamics is used as in the engineering acceptation, it
does not mean a change in the configuration or topology (and not even the power flows
over the lines). Dynamics is referred to the voltage and angular behavior over time
which concerns on stability. It does not mean a change in the configuration, but on the
voltage and angular behavior over time. Therefore, blackouts are due to voltage and
angular instability and cannot be explained by any of the previous approaches.

It seems reasonable to ask ourselves whether the power grid is only complicated or there
are other aspects that can turn it into a complex system. The answer is that maybe the
physical network is not complex, but when other layers of agents are present, an
increased number of nonlinear interactions and unexpected phenomena can easily arise.
These new agents, different from solely transformers, substations or lines, can be
multiple heterogeneous decision makers at national and transnational levels, like TSOs
(each one operating a subsystem of a global interconnected transmission system), policy
makers, regulators or market participants. Topology (and the complex networks
approach) appears then as just one more of the many dimensions of performance that
influence global risk and security. In addition to purely electrical dynamics, the specific
operative status of the grid is then a multivariable and multileveled problem, with
possibilities for emergent phenomena and self-organizing processes to develop.

From knowledge to understanding

There exists an important distinction between knowledge and understanding. While the
former is usually constituted by sets of data, facts, observations or behaviors, the later
appears when we appreciate that two or more very different-seeming phenomena can be
treated as similar in some way (Lander 2010). Complexity science has allowed the
creation of understanding out of validated bits of knowledge and there seems to be no
doubt about the usefulness of some of its concepts for understanding and optimizing
engineered systems (Ottino 2004). In the particular case of power grids, the challenges
are basically two: (a) to make useful models and theories that come from simplified
schemes and (b) to detect how far we can go in elucidating new metrics for addressing
dynamical properties of the systems components, being them transformers, lines or
users. Some of the engineering areas where complexity concepts applied to power

6
systems are useful and with a high potential of developing sound scientific frameworks
in the short and mid terms would be the following:

Smart Grids. Complex networks approach has been extremely useful in

modeling and classifying topologies of real networks (Albert, Barabsi 2002).
Some topologies are shown to be more efficient than others when information,
resources or energy transportation are taken into account as fluxes (Pagani,
Aiello 2011). On the other hand, some biologically inspired mathematical
models have captured the basic dynamics of network adaptability and have
produced solutions with properties comparable to or better than those of real-
world infrastructure networks (Tero, Takagi et al. 2010). Such models may
provide a useful starting point to improve routing protocols and topology control
for infrastructural networks. This can be applied, for example, as a tool to
support the modeling of low and medium voltage smart grids or distribution
networks designed from scratch. (Pagani, Aiello 2012)

Agents. It has been previously stated that, in the particular field of power
systems, complexity appears when users of many kind interact with the physical
system. When interacting and thoughtful agents appear, dependencies among the
elements become increasingly important, stochastic processes arise and we are
finally dealing with adaptive systems, usually modeled by computational units
termed agents (Miller, Page 2007, Railsback, Grimm 2012). Agent (or
individual) based modeling has been traditionally linked to complexity and
computer sciences and allows to modeling unique and autonomous entities that
usually interact with each other and their environment locally. Using agent-
based modeling lets us address problems that concern adaptive behavior and
emergence phenomena, very much connected to prosumers (i.e., small
producers and consumers of energy at the same time) activities and dynamic
behavior of the power grid.

Interdependent networks. Power systems are the underlying support of most

infrastructural systems. Malfunctions and failures in the former dramatically
affect the rest of interconnected networks. When interdependent networks are
taken in consideration, complexity and complex networks approaches could be
once again useful. There is a need for new robustness measures that capture not
only purely topological aspects, but also the functionality of the system as a
whole. And these approaches are useful in capturing fundamental differences
between real loads and commonly used load estimators, meta-vulnerabilities
(Kurant, Thiran 2006), or developing analytical models to study cascading
failures in interdependent networks (Newman, Nkei et al. 2005, Buldyrev,
Parshani et al. 2010, Brummitt, DSouza et al. 2012).

Above all these issues, there is a pressing requirement of communication among

scholars and academic traditions. Results from complex approximations have to be
checked with real power networks operators and facilities. Interaction and

7
collaboration between complexity and complex networks communities, on the one
hand, and electrical engineers, on the other, is compulsory. In order to fully develop the
former issues, where complexity science can clearly help engineering science and
conversely, this communicative gap between these two communities of knowledge must
be overcome. This is the only way to finally become communities of understanding.

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