Protecting Power Transmission Systems against Intelligent Physical Attacks: A Critical Systematic Review

Abstract

Power systems are exposed to various physical threats due to extreme events, technical failures, human errors, and deliberate damage. Physical threats are among the most destructive factors to endanger the power systems security by intelligently targeting power systems components, such as Transmission Lines (TLs), to damage/destroy the facilities or disrupt the power systems operation. The aim of physical attacks in disrupting power systems can be power systems instability, load interruptions, unserved energy costs, repair/displacement costs, and even cascading failures and blackouts. Due to dispersing in large geographical areas, power transmission systems are more exposed to physical threats. Power systems operators, as the system defenders, protect power systems in different stages of a physical attack by minimizing the impacts of such destructive attacks. In this regard, many studies have been conducted in the literature. In this paper, an overview of the previous research studies related to power systems protection against physical attacks is conducted. This paper also outlines the main characteristics, such as physical attack adverse impacts, defending actions, optimization methods, understudied systems, uncertainty considerations, expansion planning, and cascading failures. Furthermore, this paper gives some key findings and recommendations to identify the research gap in the literature.

A Preventive Control Approach for Power System Vulnerability Assessment and Predictive Stability Evaluation

“…This phenomenon was also proven in recent blackout events, such as those in India and Turkey [4], where blackouts of whole electrical grids were caused due to operational failures, and the South Australian Transmission Grid failure which was due to insufficient analysis of vulnerabilities as a result of extreme weather conditions [5]. Any critical component failure may have negative impacts on system operational costs due to the ramp-up/down of generators or unserved energy penalties [6][7][8][9]. In practice, PS planners design the grid to be sufficient to cope with contingencies by allocating adequate reserves in generator production and transmission lines to provide a certain level of redundancy in case of preestimated critical contingencies [10,11].…”

“…Steady-state security analysis is also a commonly used tool for determination of possible limit violations after credible outages [16,24]. However, as the grid complexity increases, the possible combinations of N-k contingencies drastically increase, which makes the analysis very time consuming, and makes real time analysis and online decision-making analysis almost unpractical [9,16]. Furthermore, as the cascading failure develops in a dynamic nature, steady state approximations become less reliable in predicting the behavior of the distorted system [25,26].…”

“…However, as the system dimension expands, the solution complexity will also increase, which makes analysis inefficient. The techno-economic results of intentional attacks on transmission lines are demonstrated in [9], which indicates the necessity for PSOs to optimize their system to be resilient against such conditions. Critical equipment determination generally targets impacts due to single branch failure or randomly generated subsets.…”