Today’s smart-grids have seen a clear rise in new ways of energy generation, transmission, and storage. This has not only introduced a huge degree of variability, but also a continual shift away from traditionally centralized generation and storage to distributed energy resources (DERs). In addition, the distributed sensors, energy generators and storage devices, and networking have led to a huge increase in attack vectors that make the grid vulnerable to a variety of attacks. The interconnection between computational and physical components through a largely open, IP-based communication network enables an attacker to cause physical damage through remote cyber-attacks or attackmore »
An Efficient Computational Strategy for Cyber-Physical Contingency Analysis in Smart Grids
The increasing penetration of cyber systems into smart grids has resulted in these grids being more vulnerable to cyber physical attacks. The central challenge of higher order
cyber-physical contingency analysis is the exponential blow-up of the attack surface due to a large number of attack vectors. This gives rise to computational challenges in devising efficient attack mitigation strategies. However, a system operator can leverage private information about the underlying network to maintain a strategic advantage over an adversary equipped with superior computational capability and situational awareness. In this work, we examine the following scenario: A malicious entity intrudes the cyber-layer of a power network and trips the transmission lines. The objective of the system operator is to deploy security measures in the cyber-layer to minimize the impact of such attacks. Due to budget constraints, the attacker and the system operator have limits on the maximum number of transmission lines they can attack or defend. We model this adversarial interaction as a resource-constrained attacker-defender game. The computational intractability of solving large security games is well known. However, we exploit the approximately modular behavior of an impact metric known as the disturbance value to arrive at a linear-time algorithm for computing an optimal more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1739969
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10311920
- Journal Name:
- IEEE PES General Meeting
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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