Quantifying the Impacts on Reliability of Coupling between Power System Cyber and Physical Components

PhD student Jiangmeng Zhang with adviser A. Domínguez-García

The operation of most modern electrical energy systems is dependent on a cyber infrastructure encompassing sensing, communication, and control devices (cyber components); however, there is no systematic method to evaluate the impact of faults in the cyber infrastructure. To address this issue, we have quantified such an impact in the transmission level on the automatic generation control system (AGC).  An open-source AGC-enabled power system dynamic simulation package with the application in cyber security is developed.

Besides transmission-level systems, high dependency on the cyber infrastructure also appears in the coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs). For instance, as shown in Fig. 1, the coordination (via an aggregator) of DERs, which can provide frequency regulation and load following services, relies highly on communication between the aggregator and individual DERs to convey the measurements and commands (i.e., u(t)’s in Figure 1). While the benefits are relatively well understood, there is virtually no work on understanding the potential negative consequences on power system performance due to communication delays or failures. We have provided a systematic method to assess these delays/failures, including short-term system dynamic performance as well as long-term system adequacy analysis. This research is supported by the Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid.

 

Figure 1. Distributed-energy resources coordination-participant architecture

Figure 1. Distributed-energy resources coordination-participant architecture