Assigning Operating Reserves in Power Systems Under Imminent Intelligent Attack Threat

Operating reserves serve as efficient tools to respond to the sudden outage of power system components caused by either natural events or intentional attacks. Contrary to the natural threats, the intentional attacks exhibit no stochastic behavior and are launched to inflict as much damage as possible to system. Moreover, these attacks are strongly influenced by the measures taken by the system operator. As a consequence, the probabilistic methods of operating reserve procurement and allocation do not prove to be efficient to confront the intelligent attacks. In this paper, the interaction between the system operator as the defender and the intelligent attacker is investigated within a linear two-person zero-sum game model. In this model, the system is scheduled and the operating reserves are allocated and deployed in a limited number of time intervals in such a way that the system incurs the least cost for the worst-case attack. The efficacy of the proposed method is examined by conducting case studies of single- and multiple-target attacks on two test systems. The results indicate that the solutions obtained by the proposed method can result in a considerable reduction in the system costs in comparison to those obtained when the system is scheduled by probabilistic methods and an intelligent attack is launched.