A tri-level programming model for attack-resilient control of power grids

Abstract

The significance of modern power grids is acknowledged every time there is a major threat. This paper proposes the novel approaches to aid power system planner to improve power grid resilience by making appropriate hardening strategies against man-made attack or natural hazards. The vulnerability indices are introduced, which return the most vulnerable component in the system based on a tri-level defender-attacker-operator (DAO) interdiction problem which solves iteratively. The output of DAO is the set of hardening strategies that optimally allocated along the network to mitigate the impact of the worst-case damages. By repeating DAO problem based on the proposed algorithm, the various crafted attack is imposed on the system, and the defender's behavior demonstrates how an element is vulnerable to threats. The WSCC 9-bus, IEEE 24-bus, and IEEE 118-bus systems are employed to evaluate the model performance. The counter-intuitive results are proven by the proposed robust hardening strategy, which shows how the hardening strategy should be allocated to improve power network resilience against threats.

A novel approach in strategic planning of power networks against physical attacks

“…This achieved by protecting the key equipment in the grid when the system planner has limited resources for hardening. Improving the bulk power system resilience against physical attack is pursed in [19,20], where the authors formulated the optimization problem to locate the hardening strategies for the most vulnerable component.…”

Analytical Approach to Study the Impacts of Mutual Coupling on Transmission Lines Protection Systems

“…Moreover, although some of the special protection and mitigation counter measures [14]- [15] are not directly affected by mutual coupling phenomena but, the performance of these unit might be affected through false trips of transmission lines and consequent changes in the impedance characteristic of the system. While the system reliability and resilience improvement are usually evaluated against deliberate intrusions [16] and extreme events [17], or pursed through substation structure enhancement [18], [19], mitigating the mutual coupling can improve network reliance. In addition, the system operation and safety which are traditionally improved by optimization approach [20], [21], protective device coordination and arc flash analysis [22] can also be affected by mutual coupling.…”

Risk assessment‐based long‐term transmission system hardening under prior probabilistic information

“…While the bi-level model represents passive defence in the sense that the defender responds to an attack only after it happens, the tri-level model can be considered active defence, since the defender deploys countermeasure resources in anticipation of an attack. The authors in [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] propose tri-level optimisation models to study the allocation of defensive resources in an electric power grid in order to improve the resiliency against multiple contingencies (a.k.a., 'N-k' contingencies). In the upper level, the system planner identifies the components to be hardened in order to reduce the damage associated with possible outages.…”

“…On the basis of the prior probabilistic information, we propose an RA-based tri-level optimisation model for transmission system hardening, which makes the fundamental difference from the traditional bi-level [12][13][14] and tri-level [16][17][18][19][20][21][22] optimisation models. The proposed model in this paper is to hedge the transmission system to improve the level of reliability.…”