A co-simulation environment to evaluate cyber resilience in active distribution grids utilising behind-the-meter assets

Abstract

The increasing utilisation of behind-the-meter assets in an active distribution grid leads to an ever more complex cyber-physical system, producing a greater dependency on active communication and increasing vulnerability to cyber attacks. Consequently, there is a need to simulate relevant cyber-physical systems and incidents and their impact to assess the overall system's cyber resilience. This paper aims to present a simulation environment that can be used to analyse the cyber resilience of different system designs. This simulation environment incorporates all relevant domains, including the energy grid, the information and communication infrastructure and the used operational technology. Furthermore, we propose a new way to abstract the communication infrastructure inside the co-simulation, including the simulation of incidents like cyber attacks and communication failures. The basis of this work is a requirements analysis that considers the events to be simulated in the form of threat modelling based on the STRIDE framework. The functioning of the entire environment is demonstrated using an example concept for voltage control in the low-voltage grid, for which a cyber attack and its effects are simulated, and finally, a more resilient alternative is presented.