Modeling an Attack-Mitigation Dynamic Game-Theoretic Scheme for Security Vulnerability Analysis in a Cyber-Physical Power System

The rapid development of advanced information and communication technology has made modern power systems evolve into more complicated cyber-physical power systems (CPPSs) with mutual coupling characteristics between cyber systems and power systems, and at the same time, the CPPSs have to confront some newly emerged risks owing to cyber system unreliability or cyberattacks. In this paper, regarding the cyber and physical attacks in a CPPS, the operation risks and vulnerabilities of transmission lines are discussed in detail by building relevant game-theoretic models. Under two possible cyberattack scenarios, namely time delay of system recovery and distributed denial of service, a three-stage defender-attacker-defender tri-level mathematical programming model is proposed based on dynamic game theory of complete information. In particular, the objective functions and corresponding constraint conditions in each level are analyzed and constructed elaborately. For the solution of this proposed tri-level programming model, a solution method based on an improved particle swarm optimization approach combined with sequential quadratic programming technique is applied during analysis. Finally, the proposed model is validated through two case studies, and some preliminary concluding remarks are summarized.