A Quantitative Risk Assessment Model for Distribution Cyber-Physical System Under Cyberattack

Abstract

An accurate and comprehensive risk assessment in a distribution cyber-physical system (DCPS) is essential to ensure its smooth operation, effective control, and exposure of hidden dangers and security implications. Unfortunately, prior risk assessment methods are mostly limited in two aspects. First, the current studies do not respect the complex network topology and intertwined devicewise dependencies, thereby failing to delineate and model the risk propagation mechanism in DCPS accurately. Second, the prior work tends to focus on gauging the risks underlying physical systems independently, overlooking the quantification of risk impact on physical systems incurred by the cyberattack. To fill the gap, in this article, we propose a unified risk assessment model that gauges the comprehensive security implication of DCPS in a Bayesian regime, in which the three key components, namely, the prior probability, posterior probability, and minimum load-loss ratio, are calculated via the cumulative densities, epidemic model, and optimal load shedding, respectively. We benchmark our proposed model on a public testbed, IEEE 39-bus system, with extensive experiments. The results substantiate the viability and effectiveness of our model and suggest that the vulnerability of DCPS is positively correlated with the three components in our Bayesian modeling. We hope this finding can shed some light on future research by providing a plausible apparatus for measuring the security implications of physical systems in DCPS under cyberattacks.