An integrated visualization approach for smart grid attacks

As the world's demand for more and cleaner energy continuously grow, smart electric power grid has become a significant research area for scientists and engineers. In the past few years, smart grid security has become an emerging topic and many new attack and defense strategies have been proposed. However, many of the outcomes of such approaches are presented in complicated ways and lack visualization capability to understand the whole grid behavior under complex attacks. In this paper, we present an integrated visualization approach to understand the smart grid attack. We introduce the ESRI ArcGIS software as our visualization platform and develop an interface so that ArcGIS can effectively exchange information and communicate with MATLAB, where the power grid security attack and defense algorithms are simulated. This integrated approach provides an effective way to understand the power grid behavior with geographical details under complex attacks. Furthermore, it could help to develop new defense strategies to improve security and reliability of smart grid.