Reliability assessment of cyber-physical power systems considering the impact of predicted cyber vulnerabilities

Abstract

This paper presents a reliability assessment technique for cyber-physical power systems (CPPSs) that incorporates cybersecurity issues by considering non-normal random variables with non-linear dependencies. Our model uses bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERTs) to predict the severity of cyber vulnerabilities by analyzing their textual description. This practical model allows the engineer to manually enter text that describes threats to predict the probability of cyber vulnerability. We use a Bayesian attack graph to simulate the attack paths and a Markov model to demonstrate the consequences of cyber attacks on the CPPS. Furthermore, a hybrid approximate-analytical approach is employed to assess the overall reliability of the CPPS when considering the load and wind generation uncertainties, given their non-linear dependencies. The proposed method is implemented on the modified IEEE Reliability Test System. The results demonstrate that the reliability indices for a simultaneous cyber attack on corporate networks and wind farm control centers are more significant than those obtained for other attack scenarios. The proposed prediction method is highly accurate, and the predicted vulnerability scores align with those provided by the National Vulnerability Database. The results are compared with sequential Monte Carlo simulation, subset simulation, and cross-entropy-based importance sampling methods. The comparison shows that the proposed method outperforms other methods in terms of convergence speed and accuracy.