Measuring and Enhancing Microgrid Resiliency Against Cyber Threats

Abstract

Recent cyber attacks on the power grid have been of increasing complexity and sophistication. In order to understand the impact of cyber-attacks on the power system resiliency, it is important to consider an holistic cyber-physical system specially with increasing industrial automation. In this study, device-level resilience properties of the various controllers and their impact on the microgrid resiliency is studied. In addition, a cyber-physical resiliency metric considering vulnerabilities, system model, and device-level properties is proposed. Resiliency is defined as the system ability to provide energy to critical loads even in extreme contingencies and depends on system ability to withstand, predict, and recover. A use case is presented inspired by the recent Ukraine cyber-attack. A use case has been presented to demonstrate application of the developed cyber-physical resiliency metric to enhance situational awareness of the operator, and enable better proactive or remedial control actions to improve resiliency.