Keynote lecture III: Energy cyber physical systems and their communication and control challenges for operational security in power systems

Abstract

The development of innovative cybersecurity technologies, tools and methodologies that advance the energy system's ability to survive cyber-attacks and incidents while sustaining critical functions, is needed for the secure operation of utility and industrial systems. It is essential to verify and validate the ability of the developed solutions and methodologies so that they can be effectively used in practice. The development of solutions to mitigate cyber vulnerabilities throughout the energy delivery system is essential to protect hardware assets. It will also make systems less susceptible to cyber threats and provide reliable delivery of electricity if a cyber incident occurred. In this talk, we will describe how the developed solution can protect the power grid and industrial infrastructure from cyber-attacks as well as build cybersecurity protection into emerging power grid components and services. This includes microgrid and demand-side management components as well as protect the network (substations and productivity lines) and data infrastructure (SCADA) to increase the resilience of the energy delivery systems against cyber-attacks. These developments will also help utility security systems manage the large amounts of cybersecurity risk data and cybersecurity operations. For these developments to succeed, cybersecurity testbeds and testing methodologies are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of any proposed security technologies. The focus in the development of cybersecurity capabilities in energy systems should span over multiple strategies; in the near term, midterm and long term. The continuous security state monitoring across cyber-physical domains is the goal in the near term. The development of continually defending interoperable components that continue operating in degraded conditions is required in the midterm. The development of methodologies to mitigate cyber incidents to quickly return to normal operations is necessary for all system components in the long term. We will discuss R&D efforts in these areas centered on the development of operational frameworks related to communication and interoperability, control and protection. The importance of interoperability between smart grid applications and multi-vendor devices is important and must be considered. The current grid is composed of multi-vendor devices and multi-lingual applications that add to the complexity of integrating the smart grid components and also securing them. Standards development entities have been working with utilities, vendors, and regulatory bodies on developing standards that address interoperability in the smart grid. These include IEEE, IEC, NIST, ANSI, NERC and many others. In this presentation, we will conceptualize a comprehensive cyber-physical platform which involve the communication and power network sides integrating the cyber information flow, physical information flow, and the interaction between them. A data-centric communication middleware provides a common-data bus to orchestrate the system's components together leading to an expandable multi-lingual system. We will present a hardware protocol gateway that was developed as a protocol translator capable of mapping IEC 61850 generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE) and sampled measured value (SMV) messages into the data-centric Data Distribution Service (DDS) global data bus. This is necessary for integrating the widely used IEC 61850-based devices into an exhaustive microgrid control and security framework. We will also discuss a scalable cloud-based Multi-Agent System for the control of large scale penetration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and their infrastructure into the power grid. This is a system that is able to survive cyber-attacks while sustaining critical functions. This framework's network will be assessed by applying contingencies and identifying the resulting signatures for detection in real-time operation. As a result, protective measures can be taken to address the dynamic threats in the foreseen grid-integrated EV parks where the developed system will have an automated response to a cyber-attack. In distributed energy management systems, the protection system must be adaptive. It is assisted by communication networks to react to dynamic changes in the microgrid configurations. In this regard, this presentation will also describe a newly developed protection scheme with extensive communication provided by IEC 61850 standard for power networks to monitor the microgrid during these dynamic changes. The robustness and availability of the communication infrastructure is required for the success of protection measures. This scheme is an adaptive protection scheme for AC microgrids that is capable of surviving communication failures through energy storage systems.