Smart distribution grids have new protection concepts known as fault self-healing whereby Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) can automatically reconfigure the power circuits to isolate faults and restore power to the relevant sections. This is typically implemented with IEDs exchanging IEC 61850 Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) messages in a peer-to-peer communication network. However, a selfhealing application may be faced by challenges of emerging cyber-physical security threats. These can result in disruption to the applications' operations thereby affecting the power system reliability. Blockchain is one technology that has been deployed in several applications to offer security and bookkeeping. In this paper, we propose a novel concept using blockchain as a second-tier security mechanism to support time-critical selfhealing operations in smart distribution grids. We show through a simulation study the impact of our proposed architecture when compared with a normal self healing architecture. The results show that our proposed architecture can achieve significant savings in time spent in no-power state by portions of the grid during cyber-physical attacks.
Bitcoin has become the leading cryptocurrency system, but the limit on its transaction processing capacity has resulted in increased transaction fee and delayed transaction confirmation. As such, it is pertinent to understand and probably predict how transactions are handled by Bitcoin such that a user may adapt the transaction requests and a miner may adjust the block generation strategy and/or the mining pool to join. To this aim, the present paper introduces results from an analysis of transaction handling in Bitcoin.Specifically, the analysis consists of two-part. The first part is an exploratory data analysis revealing key characteristics in Bitcoin transaction handling. The second part is a predictability analysis intended to provide insights on transaction handling such as (i) transaction confirmation time, (ii) block attributes, and (iii) who has created the block. The result shows that some models do reasonably well for (ii), but surprisingly not for (i) or (iii).
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