Cyber-Power Testbed for Analyzing Distributed Control Performance during Cyber-Events

In recent years, increasing attention over distributed control or optimization applications necessitated a unified environment to validate their performance. The proposed cyber-power co-simulation test-bed provides a realistic environment to facilitate such performance analysis, where the quasi-static power network is modeled using OpenDSS, and a realistic cyber network is modeled using Mininet. A distributed coordination algorithm using network communication has been developed to aid distributed applications such as distributed Volt-VAR control to determine the connectivity of distributed controllers. The entire co-simulation test-bed is integrated together using a wrapper developed using python. Two cyber-attack scenarios, namely, the Man in the Middle and the Denial-of-Service, have been appropriately modeled to test the performance of the considered control/optimization algorithm. We have shown the efficacy of our test-bed while simultaneously analyzing the performance of the distributed control algorithm utilizing an IEEE 13-node 3-ϕ unbalanced distribution network, with a feedback-based Volt-VAR optimization algorithm as a use-case.