Vulnerability analysis for simultaneous attack in smart grid security

Power grid infrastructures have been exposed to several terrorists and cyber attacks from different perspectives and have resulted in critical system failures. Among different attack strategies, simultaneous attack is feasible for the attacker if enough resources are available at the moment. In this paper, vulnerability analysis for simultaneous attack is investigated, using a modified cascading failure simulator with reduced calculation time than the existing methods. A new damage measurement matrix is proposed with the loss of generation power and time to reach the steady-state condition. The combination of attacks that can result in a total blackout in the shortest time are considered as the strongest simultaneous attack for the system from attacker's viewpoint. The proposed approach can be used for general power system test cases. In this paper, we conducted the experiments on W&W 6 bus system and IEEE 30 bus system for demonstration of the result. The modified simulator can automatically find the strongest attack combinations for reaching maximum damage in terms of generation power loss and time to reach black-out.

I. Introduction

In the last decade, smart grid technology has changed the area of power system by all means. Introducing many features, smart grid technology has brought a new era of revolution in all of the sectors of power system including generation, transmission and distribution [1]. Integration of information and communication technologies (ICT), renewable energy integration as distributed energy resource (DER), intelligent and automated control techniques, advanced metering infrastructures (AMI), optimization of demand response, energy management system (EMS) etc. has made the smart grid technology an inevitable part of power system operation. Moreover, smart grid technology has been accompanied by cyber physical system (CPS), specially in the power system, adding reliability, mobility, flexibility and robustness [2]. Several incidents from the history proves the necessity of security analysis in smart power systems. Such as in north eastern blackout in United States [3], Bangladesh [4], Ukraine [5], India [6], Indonesia [7] etc.