Communication Incidents in Self-Organising Cyber-Physical Energy Systems: Assessing Robustness

Within Cyber-Physical Energy Systems (CPES), the communication infrastructure affects the performance of the power system, as time delays or data losses impact the system’s functionality. Several communication incidents threaten the robustness of the system. This paper presents an overview of these, classifying them according to several characteristics. In addition, a recommendation on relevant incidents to consider when investigating the communication robustness of CPES is given. Finally, this paper provides an exemplary implementation of an agent-based energy system control use case, considering a communication network and its effects, to showcase the aforementioned contributions. The implementation is applied to evaluate the impacts of the selected incidents, using several metrics. It can be used to evaluate possible or existing control concepts and to assess the overall robustness of a system.