Developing Effective Strategies for Enhancing Power System Resiliency in the Presence of Cyber-Physical Attacks

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As compared with the traditional power system, one of the major characteristics of the evolving smart grid is the widespread deployment of more cyber technologies for achieving various measurement, communication, and control functionalities. However, the implementation of myriad information and communication technologies will inevitably increase the cyber vulnerability of the power grid. Besides cyber intrusions, the power grid is also under emerging threats from physical attacks. For example, attackers could physically attack deliberately selected equipment to disrupt the power supply. Man-made sabotage in the form of potential terrorist activities are also receiving more attention recently. This project will lead to transformative results by addressing several pressing smart grid cyber-physical security problems. It will significantly advance the state of the art by developing a comprehensive framework for cyber-physical risk assessment and mitigation scheme development. The developed cyber-physical security analysis models will be able to cover a wide range of uncertainties in physical components, cyber vulnerability, physical vulnerability, human factors, etc. This is expected to lead to significant advancement in the field of power system cyber-physical security, resiliency, and trustworthiness by considering a comprehensive set of uncertain factors. The quantitative study in the project will enable more informed decision-making for power system operators and planners. The project outcomes will allow utilities, regulators, and government agencies to evaluate and improve cyber-physical security and resiliency of modern electric power systems. In addition, the research outcomes will be integrated into a wide variety of educational and outreach activities for equipping the next-generation workforce with the awareness on the emerging cyber-physical vulnerabilities in national critical infrastructures. Implementation of myriad advanced sensing, communication, and control technologies in smart grid deployment also increases concerns on cyber-physical vulnerability, and research in this field will be critical to the success of the smart grid in the long term. The major goal of this project is to enhance power system resiliency in the presence of emerging cyber-physical attacks. Three novel strategies are proposed for this purpose which can be deployed in either the system planning or operation stage, including the efficient identification of comprehensive critical contingencies relating to cyber-physical attacks, resiliency-oriented security-constrained optimal power flow, and robust optimization based power system protection accounting for uncertainties. The major research tasks of this project are: 1) developing an efficient procedure for comprehensively identifying the critical components in a power system based on an integrated state space pruning and intelligent search methodology; 2) developing a novel resiliency-oriented optimal power flow framework and an associated hybrid parallel computing solution; and 3) developing a novel scheme for allocating defensive resources to minimize damage considering the uncertainties in offensive resources based on a multiple-attack-scenario defender-attacker-defender model. These proposed defense strategies could result in major enhancement of the resiliency of contemporary power grids in the presence of adverse, significant cyber-physical events.