A Preliminary Study of Electric Power System Reliability Considering State Estimation in Cloud-based Environment

With the continuous rapid expansion of smart grid technology, the power system data and information will show explosive growth, which undoubtedly will challenge the power system operation. Be as a possible candidate, cloud computing has the ability to tackle these issues. Meanwhile, one problem should be considered that how to analyze the influence of success probability of cyber attacks against the cloud-based state estimation in the power grid due to the cyber vulnerability. In this paper, the cyber attacks model in cloud environment is analyzed. Also, the attacker skill levels and cloud vulnerabilities are studied as the factors for influencing the attack success probability. A framework for integrated modeling and evaluation of a composite power system considering the power system state estimation in cloud-based environment is proposed. An example based on IEEE 14-bus system is analyzed to show the influence of the successful cyber attacks to state estimation outsourced to the cloud. The Monte Carlo simulation is applied and the simulation results show that power system reliability is impacted by the cyber attacks against state estimation in electric power grids.