Risk evaluation for hypothesized multiple busbar outages

Prioritization of MTTC-based combinatorial evaluation for hypothesized substations outages

“…This contingency analysis is based on the relationship between the substation critical cyber systems that have direct interaction with the physical power grid, i.e., the cyber asset that would have control capability to disconnect local components from the grid. Based on the conclusion of the previous work [8], [17], manipulation of microprocessor-based relays on bus differential protection would have a detrimental effect to disconnect large number of components from the system. At the minimum, the hypotheses of cyberattack would occur at multiple substations as attackers would be able to intrude to the S number of IP-based substations.…”

“…Since the solution space of the sum of S-select-k problem can be extremely large, a systematic elimination approach using power flow module is used to validate each combination in order to capture the worst combinations [8], [9], [17]. This process eliminates insignificant combinations, enumerating from the first-level substation list of the RPM.…”

“…3) Breadth First Search (BFS) [8], [17]; and 4) Hybrid approach based on MTTF values and BFS approach (this paper). …”

“…An approach to hypothesize multiple substation outages is proposed to presume a set of combinations with IP-based substation network which are compromised by intruders and being electronically manipulated to abruptly isolate substations from the grid with disruptive switching actions [8], [17]. The multiple substation outages is to determine hypothetical scenarios and the bottleneck of a power system.…”